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Since his trip to Monaco, Phillips has introduced many audiences to Burgess's music. He has conducted orchestral pieces with the Brown University Orchestra and Pioneer Valley Orchestra, performed solo piano and chamber music compositions, and engaged other musicians to perform Burgess's works. So far, he has been involved with the performances of nearly twenty compositions, many of them world premières.

In 1999, Phillips produced an all-Burgess concert at Brown University that began with two of the earliest preserved works by Burgess: Wiegenlied composed in 1952, and Preludes (1964), both for piano solo. The concert also featured Master Coale's Pieces, a work written for Samuel Coale, a professor at Wheaton College and resident of Providence, Rhode Island, with Coale in attendance and hearing the complete work for the first time.

On 25 June 2004, at the opening of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, Phillips and his opera-singer wife Kathryne Jennings performed several Burgess compositions for the opening. Jennings sang two James Joyce songs, Strings and Ecce Puer; a Thomas Hardy song, The Oxen; and a Shakespeare song, Under the Greenwood Tree, all with music by Burgess. Phillips performed the world première of Nine Miniatures, a work for solo piano.

Phillips also wrote the entry on Burgess for the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and several articles for The Anthony Burgess Newsletter. He has lectured widely on Burgess's music and presented papers at several international conferences. His book will include a musical biography of Burgess and an analysis of the music.

Phillips is a composer, conductor and pianist, as well as a music scholar whose writings have been published in Music Analysis, Symphony Magazine and other music journals. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music with degrees in composition and conducting. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, Tanglewood, Aspen and other music academies, including the Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has taken part in conducting master classes and symposia with Erich Leinsdorf, Pierre Boulez and Leonard Slatkin. He serves as Music Consultant and Correspondent of the Anthony Burgess Center in France and is one of the featured commentators and performers in The Burgess Variations, a 1999 BBC television documentary about Anthony Burgess. Paul Phillips is Director of Orchestras and Chamber Music at Brown University and also serves as Music Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus in Massachusetts.

An upcoming article, to commemorate the birthday of Burgess in February 2005, will feature an in-depth interview with Phillips about the music of Burgess and its relation to British and international music history.