Barbara Heller, born in 1936 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein to a family of restorers, she studied music in Mannheim and Munich. From 1958 to 1962 she was lecturer for piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Mannheim. After studying composition with Hans Vogt in Mannheim and Harald Genzmer in Munich and a short-term scholarship for film music in Siena, she received several scholarships to attend the Internationale Ferienkursen für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, where since 1963 she has been a freelance composer and pianist as well as archiving and documenting the papers of the Darmstadt composer Hermann Heiß. From 1986 to 1993 she was a board member of the Darmstadt Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung. In 1978 she became a founding member of the international working group Frau und Musik (Woman and music) and was active on the board until 1981. In numerous concerts, lectures, radio broadcasts, and publications as well as an editor of musical editions, she has presented the results of her research work in the area of women in music. As a pianist she performed concerts of women’s music until 1990, both solo recitals and with various ensembles she founded.
Barbara Heller’s compositions focus on piano and chamber music and on songs but also on multidisciplinary projects like experiments with visual artists, tape collages, sound installations, collaborative compositions, and collective projects. Her instrumental compositions are notated both traditional and experimentally or graphically and have been published in total by the publishing houses Furore and Schott Musik International. Her music is characterized by great stylistic variety and by development on the basis of solid roots in tradition: serious and passionate, impulsive and playful, archaic or completely structured, strictly worked out or with a touch of improvisation, poetic and alive.
Barbara Heller lives and works in Darmstadt, in the Odenwald, and on La Gomera in the Canary Islands.