Ezra Sims is known mainly as a composer of microtonal music. He made his professional debut (with his earlier twelve-note music) on a Composers Forum program, in New York, in 1959. In 1960, he found himself compelled by his ear to begin writing microtonal music, which he has done almost exclusively since then — aside from several years when he made tape music for dancers, musicians at the time being generally even more afraid of microtones than they are now. His music has been performed from Tokyo to Salzburg.
He has received various awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Koussevitzky commission, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He has lectured on his music in the US and abroad, most notably at the Hambürger Musikgespräch in 1994; the second Naturton Symposium in Heidelberg in 1992; and the 3rd and 4th Symposium, Mikrotöne und Ekmelische Musik, at the Hochschüle für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mozarteum, Salzburg, in 1989 and 1991. In 1992 and 1993, he was guest lecturer in the Richter Herf Institut für Musikalische Grundlagenforschung in the Mozarteum.
He has published articles on his technique in Computer Music Journal, Mikrotöne III, Mikrotöne IV, Perspectives of New Music, and Ex Tempore.
With Ted Mook, he designed a font, for use with computer printing programs, for his set of accidentals sufficient for 72-note music that has been widely adopted in the field (http://www.mindeartheart.org/MWFS.html).
He was co-founder - with Rodney Lister and Scott Wheeler - of the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, of which he was President from 1977-1981, and a member of its Board of Directors from that time to 2003.
His music is published by Frog Peak Music and Diapason Press (Corpus Microtonale) and is available on releases from New World Records.