The ramified life's work of the composer, director, holder of the Georg Büchner Professorship at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and virtuoso instrumentalist Heiner Goebbels has developed over the decades into a participatory, low-threshold social sculpture.

With his music-theatrical, media-artistic and last but not least with his concert radio plays, he has brought the much scolded so-called high culture down to earth: There is nothing good unless you do it!

Goebbels makes this secure participation in his multicolored dazzling works possible by means of the beats that recur in his work - and be it the sound of dripping water, for example in his installative theater work "Stifters Dinge" (Lausanne, 2007).

In the beat, Goebbels is his own classicist.

Pulse and impulse are one with him.

In it he meets the other big birthday boy of the year, Wolfgang Rihm.

In addition: Both Heiner-Müller affinity at the same time shortly before the political change connects them more than a perceived skat brotherhood.

Working on the same material, they found artistic answers to pressing social questions, such as what role art could still play in the administered world?

The answers were just as pessimistic as they were visionary, because – the avant-gardist knows what falls, you have to push – the SED dictatorship no longer exists.

Three days before November 9, 1989, Goebbels gave the Wolokolamsker Chaussee in New York together with Heiner Müller and his dream reciter Ernst Stötzner.

They returned home to a fundamentally different world: contradictio in adjecto.

So whether it’s a punk band, Claus Peymann, rap from the very beginning, passers-by, men’s choral society, Ensemble Modern, left-wing radical wind orchestra or Heiner Müller: in the assembled contrast, everything becomes more artistic because there is room for the imagination of the recipient – ​​if the context is right!

The recipient, gifted with reason, feels and thinks Goebbels art further associatively and thereby becomes an artist himself.

For Goebbels, the Ensemble Modern – the new joint CD with “A House of Call.

My Imaginary Notebook" will be published by ECM on August 19th - still a kind of catalyst. The same applies vice versa to the Ensemble Modern: Thanks to its open work structures, Goebbels literally gives the innovative ensemble a future, namely to be confident in the future.

Through the Ensemble Modern concerts, he himself has repeatedly become a red-hot contemporary, for example in the experimentally created choreographed music theater “Schwarz auf Weiß” (1996) or his fully composed living image and long-running hit “Eislermaterial” (1998) with the grandiose Sepp Bierbichler as the head voice Eisler interpreters.

"That a good Germany is blooming" (at least that of contemporary music and art), as Bierbichler intones in the "Eislermaterial" Bertolt Brecht's "Children's Anthem" in a shaky, senile manner. The still lively Heiner Goebbels has dedicated his work to this service.

That is his historical achievement.

Today he is seventy years old.