At first, José Júlio Lopes wrote mostly music for the theatre. Nowadays, his catalogue includes works for chamber orchestra, instruments, solo voice, choir, voice and piano, electroacoustics and opera. He studied Piano (with Teresa Menéres and Nuno Vieira de Almeida), Music Theory (in the Amadores de Música Academy) and Composition with Lopes-Graça, Christopher Bochmann, Carlos Caires and António Pinho Vargas. He attended seminars and masterclasses with Emmanuel Nunes at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and with Franco Donatoni at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Lopes later completed a Master Degree in Communication Sciences and is now preparing a PhD about "Music, Drama, New Technologies: the Opera of the future". He is currently a teacher and researcher at the CESEM (Centre for Studies in Sociology and Musical Aesthetics) in the New University of Lisbon.

As an outcome of his first interest for the theatre, he became well aware that "contemporary music is essentially dramatic", dedicating his attention to the opera and the musical theatre. In 1986 he presented a musical theatre multimedia piece called Averroes, based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges. He composed and directed the opera Nefertiti in 2000, and was the coauthor of its libretto. This was a co-production with the D. Maria National Theatre and the Trindade Theatre.

His work is consistently performed in concerts and festivals. Ein Bahn Str — A Small Drama After R.M. Rilke for soprano, piano and 10 double-basses was presented by Lúcia Lemos, Elizabeth Davis and the Contr’Orchestra in the Small Room at the Belém Art Centre, Pyr for chamber orchestra was played by OrchestrUtopica and directed by Tapio Tuomela in the Great Hall at the Belém Art Centre; Magma was played by OrchestrUtopica and directed by Cesário Costa at the Casa da Música in Oporto; SpaceCtrl was presented by OrchestrUtopica directed by Cesário Costa at the Alter Schlachthof Dresden during the Dresden Musik Festspiele. José Júlio Lopes co-founded the OrchestrUtopica and is presently its artistic director.