Bernd Franke was born in Weissenfels in 1959. From 1975 to 1981 he attended the Leipzig Musikhochschule Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, where he studied with Siegfried Thiele (composition) and Wolf-Dieter Hauschild (conducting).

From 1981 he taught at Leipzig University, the Institute of Musicology, and at Leipzig Musikhochschule, where he also founded the ensemble Gruppe Junge Musik Leipzig in 1980, serving as its director until 1983. From 1981 to 1985 he was a special masterclass pupil at the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1981 Franke was awarded the Hanns Eisler Prize by East German Radio and the Mendelssohn Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture. In 1989 he went on a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship to Tanglewood Music Center (USA), where he worked with Bernstein, Lukas Foss, Louis Krasner, and Oliver Knussen. From 1993 to 1996 he travelled frequently in the United States on lecture series, study grants, and concert tours. In 1994 he was invited by Hans Werner Henze to become a jury member of the Munich Biennale of New Music Theater. In 1998 Franke founded the Ensemble Solo Xfach with the specific aim of promoting the works of his Xfach cycle in definitive performances.

In 2000 Franke produced the first prerecorded tapes for Solo Xfach at the electronic studio of Berlin Technical University(2000). The same year saw initial productions of parts of the Solo Xfach cycle by Hessian Radio in Frankfurt and a full-length concert consisting of Solo Xfach and a video installation by Peter Kees, mounted in the German Pavilion at the Hanover EXPO. In 2002, with the support of the Goethe Institute, several of his works were premièred and he undertook lecture tours of the United States and Canada (New York, Pittsburgh, Toronto/Winnipeg).

Bernd Franke’s works have been published exclusively by C. F. Peters since 2002.