Heiner Goebbels
Heiner Goebbels (* Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Germany) is a musician, composer and theatre maker. He lives in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Goebbels is one of the most important representatives of the contemporary music and theatre scene. His compositions for ensembles and large orchestras are performed all over the world, as are his music theatre and scenic concerts.
Goebbels has also created a large number of sound and video installations for the Documenta in Kassel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.
His multimedia concepts go beyond the traditional framework of concert music and conventional theatre. He uses space and light, words and movement with the same virtuosity as instruments and voices, invented or found material to realise his music-theatrical concepts, extending the concept of composition beyond its sonic qualities.
His oeuvre also includes audio works based on texts by Heiner Müller, compositions for ensemble and orchestra such as “Surrogate Cities” (1994) or “A House Of Call” (2020) and music theatre pieces such as “Schwarz auf Weiss” (1996), “Eraritjaritjaka” (2004) or “Stifters Dinge” (2007).
Works such as “Schwarz auf Weiss” and “Eislermaterial” are part of the repertoire of the Ensemble Modern.
In the former iron works Völklinger Hütte, Goebbels recently presented his new work “Orakelmaschine”, a site-specific project with light, music and voices.
In the 1970s, Heiner Goebbels became known for his work as a duo with Alfred Harth, and later with the experimental rock group Cassiber. He currently works with the electro-acoustic formation The Mayfield.
Goebbels has also written theoretical texts published in the anthology “Komposition als Inszenierung”, (2002) and his book “Aesthetics of Absence – Texts on Theatre” (2015).
From 1999 to 2018, Goebbels was professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, and from 2018, he was appointed as the first recipient of the Georg Büchner Professorship at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen. From 2006 to 2018, he was president of the Hessian Theatre Academy, to whose foundation he contributed significantly, and which is committed to promoting young artists and, among other things, art as social practice.
From 2012 to 2014, he was Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale.
Heiner Goebbels is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and other academies of science and the arts.
Goebbels has received numerous awards for his artistic work, including the Prix Italia, the European Theatre Prize and the International Ibsen Prize.
All Appearances of Heiner Goebbels
Heiner Goebbels: piano
Camille Emaille: percussion
Gianni Gebbia: saxophones
Cecile Lartigeau: ondes martinot
Nicolas Perrin: guitar, electronics
Willi Bopp: sound design
“Mayfield is the name of an old train station depot in Manchester where we rehearsed and staged this performance “Everything That’s Happened And Would Happen”. Now a hip hotspot for the city, in 2018 it was still a cold, wet hall with long reverberations that were not only totally filthy with pigeons, all of which had a big influence on the aesthetics of the music that was created there. Apart from the Sicilian saxophonist Gianni Gebbia, whom I have known since the 90s, and Willi Bopp, with whom I have worked as a sound designer since 1989, I first looked for and found the musicians from The Mayfield for this performance: Camille Emaille, a fantastic, incredibly differentiated improvising drummer and percussionist; despite or perhaps because of her classical training, from which she has distanced herself.
Cecile Lartigau plays one of the very first electronic instruments, the Ondes Martenot, for which Olivier Messiaen, for example, composed. She is regarded as one of the few virtuoso soloists for this music in the world’s major concert halls. As an improviser, she brings out sounds from the instrument that have never been heard before.
Nicolas Perrin is not only a guitarist but also an instrument maker and has such a physical grip on the samples and field recordings on the electric guitar he developed that my own sampling in the 80s seems very poor in comparison.
We all work together on “electro-acoustic music”, in which the transformation of sounds and the classical attributions of instruments play a major role. Gianni Gebbia, for example, developed circular breathing – permanent breathing on the saxophone – more than thirty years ago. We are concerned both with the musicalisation of noise and, conversely, with not integrating technological developments into an existing musical concept, but rather accepting them as a challenge for a new common aesthetic: to be surprised.”
Excerpt from the Monheim Papers 2025, Thomas Venker.
