Heiner Goebbels was born in Neustadt an der Weinstraße (Rhineland-Palatinate) and began studying music at home at an early age (piano, cello, and guitar). In 1972, he moved to Frankfurt to complete degrees in sociology (1975, with a thesis on Hanns Eisler) and in music (in 1978). In Frankfurt, he lived in a squat, and after meeting the free-jazz saxophonist Alfred Harth, founded the Sogenanntes Linksradikales Blasorchester (“So-called Radical Left-Wing Wind Orchestra”), a street performance ensemble composed of professional and amateur musicians, with whom he recorded two albums. After the orchestra disbanded, he continued to play with Alfred Harth until 1988, putting out several albums in which one can observe his discovery of electronic instruments and detect hints of his later work. Between 1982 and 1992, the two musicians were also a part of the experimental rock group Cassiber, along with Chris Cutler and Christoph Anders. Heiner Goebbels is one of the few contemporary music composers of his generation to keep one foot in the world of improvised and experimental music, and would cross paths with artists such as Don Cherry, Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Charles Hayward, Arto Lindsay, Peter Brötzmann, Otomo Yoshihide, Xavier Garcia, and Yves Robert.

At the same time, Goebbels began composing for theater, and in 1979 was named musical director of the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus. In total, he wrote some thirty scores for stage (including for Hans Neuenfels, Claus Peymann, Matthias Langhoff, Ruth Berghaus) and film. His encounter with writer Heiner Müller in the mid 1980s was a turning point in his career, and Goebbels wrote his first radio pieces with texts by Müller: Verkommenes Ufer (1984), Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1989), and SHADOW/Landscape With Argonauts (1990) were all revolutionary in the radio drama genre, garnering the composer numerous prizes (including the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden, the Prix Italia, and the Karl Sczuka Prize). They show both an attachment to the text and the ability to artfully work with mixed media (Die Befreiung des Prometheus), which the composer would quickly apply to the stage. After “stage concerts” such as Der Mann im Fahrstuhl (1987), and a concert for dancer, Thränen des Vaterlands (1986), Goebbels turned in the 1990s to hybrid stage performances such as Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (1990), Stifters Dinge (2008), Schwarz auf Weiß (1996), Eraritjaritjaka (2004), and Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten (2002). All of these draw on multiple textual sources (Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Edgar-Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, etc.) while calling on musicians from very diverse backgrounds, abolishing the boundary between opera, concert, and theater while playing with the tensions created by their various component parts (light, actors, sets, etc.). These creations were also adaptable to many forms, including stage productions, radio dramas, and visual installations.

Since the late 1980s, Heiner Goebbels has also composed “autonomous” pieces for the Ensemble Modern, as well as for the Ensemble intercontemporain, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Conceived in 1994 for the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, and recorded on the ECM label, Surrogate Cities for large orchestra (1994) was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2001.

A member of the Frankfurt and Berlin Academies of the Arts, Goebbels taught for twenty years at the Justus-Liebig-University Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen, where he is now an honorary professor. He served as president of the Theater Academy of Hesse from 2006 to 2018, and as artistic director of the Ruhr Triennale from 2012 to 2014, where he produced three works that he saw as milestones in musical theater: Europeras by John Cage, Delusion of the Fury by Harry Partch, and De Materie by Louis Andriessen. His own compositions have received many awards and honors, including a retrospective at the Musiques en Scène Biennale in Lyon in 2014.

In June 2018, Goebbels participated in IRCAM’s ManiFeste Academy, holding a huge workshop for young dancers, choreographers, and improvisational musicians in the Centquatre-Paris arts center.