Paweł Szymański was born on 28 March 1954 in Warsaw. In 1978 he completed (with distinction) his compositional studies under Włodzimierz Kotoński at the F. Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. He also studied under Tadeusz Baird (1978) and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati in Vienna (1984-1985, on a Herder scholarship). In 1976 Szyma ski took part in the International Summer Academy of Ancient Music in Innsbruck, and in 1978, 1980 and 1982 in the International Summer Courses of New Music in Darmstadt. He cooperated with the Independent Electroacoustic Music Studio (1979-81) and with the Studio of Electronic Music attached to the Academy of Music in Kraków (1983).
In the spring of 1987 his Partita IV was written for and first performed at the Sonorities'87 Festival in Belfast. In the same year an entire concert of his music was presented in the Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Hall. He received the First Prize at the Young Polish Composers' Competition for Gloria (1979) and Fourth Mention in the category of Young Composers' Works at the UNESCO International Composers' Rostrum in Paris for the same work (1981). He also won a prize at the Competition for Composers of Sacred Music organized by Stuttgart's Internationale Bachakademie in 1985 for Lux Aeterna. In 1994 he received the Grand Prize of the Culture Foundation in Poland and is widely regarded as the most important composer in his generation in Poland.

His works have been performed in many countries including Poland, Austria, Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany, France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Sweden and the USA. In 1988 Szymański worked at the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University in West Berlin, where he produced his tape piece Through the Looking Glass II. In the same year Prtita III was the joint winning work in the Benjamin Britten Composers Competition which resulted in Szymański being commissioned to write a piece for chamber orchestra by the Aldeburgh Festival - A Study of Shade for orchestra, which premiered in 1989. The "sur-conventionalist" (Szymański's term) or "postmodernist" orchestral work Quasi una Sinfonietta composed for the London Sinfonietta in 1990 plays with listeners' expectations arising from the patterns used in classical music (interrupted cadential progressions, irregular repetitions, puzzling fragmentation of texture made from recognizable gestures). This music is filled with irony and composed with audible quotation marks.

In May 1994 Szymański's composition Miserere was submitted by the Polish Radio to the UNESCO International Composers' Rostrum in Paris, where it received a distinction. The year 1995 saw the world premiere of Szymański's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (commissioned by Radio France) by the Katowice Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit, with Ewa Poblocka as the soloist. The work received an enthusiastic welcome from Polish music critics, so much so that Bohdan Pociej devoted a whole column in Ruch Muzyczny to the fact of its composition and to its significance in contemporary Polish music. In 1996 Szymański was the featured composer at the Toronto Soundstreams Festival, and his new work for string quartet and clarinet, Recalling a Serenade, was premiered at Finland's Kuhmo Festival with the Silesian String Quartet and Kari Kriikku. His music is published by Chester Music. Szymański lives and works as a free-lance artist in Warsaw.

Szymański's views about music notation and manuscripts has evolved through the years. His early published works were engraved by his Polish publisher, Agencja Autorska . The British publishing house, Novello (and later Chester Music who bought Novello) issued his scores in facsimile copies of the original manuscripts, with all their imperfections (several examples are on display). Finally, during the past five years, the composer has turned to writing on a computer (in the Finale program that allows one to make corrections, revisions and generate the parts). Thus, the "manuscript" which at first was invisible and replaced by a perfectly clear print, and which became ubiquitous in the form of the facsimile edition, finally disappeared. It outlived its usefulness in the technologically advanced workshop of a computer-savvy composer. Yet, Szymański, like Górecki, collects the originals of his scores, giving away only pieces written for someone else, e.g. the Canon for Majka (1983) which has over 30 different solutions.