The sounds of the city

Heiner Goebbels's works mix high and low art, pop and classical, in exciting collages

From Helsinki to Istanbul, and from Huddersfield to Edinburgh (where he has featured four times in the past five years), the composer Heiner Goebbels is a hot ticket at festivals around the world. He has critics struggling for words – "unclassifiable ... surreal ... magical ... miraculous". Audiences are alternately bewitched, bothered and bewildered. The "classical" composer who started his own rock band but is now working on an opera "Landscape with Distant Relatives" to texts by visual artists, who happily pairs Gertrude Stein with the Beach Boys in his recent theatre piece Hashirigaki wants to knock down the wall between the stage and the audience. "It's hopeless trying to convey emotions on stage. It doesn't work with sex, it doesn't work with laughter, it doesn't work with anything. It only works if the barrier between performer and onlooker is broken down."

To ensure this happens he travels with his music when he can, preserving how he wants it presented – "I don't write down directions, I don't trust paper" – working in well over 30 countries in the past 15 years. However his big multi media work Surrogate Cities which receives its first UK performance at the Edinburgh Festival is more of a musical urban sprawl than any tourist variations. Composed in 1994 for the 1,200th anniversary of the city of Frankfurt where Goebbels lives, it's a journey through unidentified, unfamiliar landscapes.

"It's not a portrait of any particular city. It grew out my experience as a citizen in the past 30 years. I don't intend anything literal when I quote sounds from other sources. Yes, I've been in Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Lyons, St. Petersburg – cities whose ambient urban sounds are mixed here with mechanical noises, industrial dissonances – but it's more an impression, an architectural collage. I've lived in Frankfurt for so long though that I am not immune to the speed, clarity, brutality, confrontation, generosity, openness of this city."

Other composers may quote beeping car horns or recognisable street cacophony but, he's clearly saying, this is worlds away from any "American in Paris". "Music has no home any more," Goebbels once said, and as if to prove it he creates his own distinctive musical contours in Surrogate Cities – Baroque quotations, expressionist harmonies, jazz riffs and rock licks, electrifying instrumental ostinatos and urgent percussion, and an eclectic choice of texts. It's as if the technique of film, the flashbacks, the method of telling stories, the editing process, has been applied to music.

The searchlights of Surrogate Cities also penetrate beneath the metropolitan jungle to the history of life beneath street level, from sewers to the ruins of another civilisation, drawing on the past in such movement titles as chaconne, allemande, gigue etc... Goebbels felt it important to preserve the memory of the Jewish cantorial tradition. "I decided to use not a live performer but scratchy recordings from the Twenties and Thirties. Jewish culture was extinguished here in Frankfurt and also in Europe and it needs to be kept safe for the future."

Some works, he says, are nearly unthinkable without the performers for whom they were written. The orchestra for the Edinburgh performance of Surrogate Cities may be different (the versatile BBC Scottish Symphony) but the vocalists are the original performers also featured on the CD. The soul-jazz diva Jocelyn B Smith (like you never heard her on the soundtrack of The Lion King moves effortlessly from grand operatic declamation to bluesy croon and the virtuoso improviser David Moss turns the volume and intensity up and down to astonishing effect. Goebbels was assisted on the orchestration of his polyglot score by the Turkish-German Ali N Askin, who worked with Frank Zappa on The Yellow Shark. "Far too theatrical to be opera, and far too operatic to be theatre," was how one critic judged Goebbels's work and that probably suits him.

"I have the privilege of being in at least two professions. I'm a composer and a maker of theatre and I like to switch from one to the other. After Surrogate Cities in which I had to compose so many notes it was easier to write La Reprise for just three characters, incorporating music from Prince and Bach and Brahms. It was a great relief, having been immersed in theatre, to go back to composing alone in my basement."

Does his gift for pairing off the most unlikely bedfellows suggest a mischievous streak? "I don't see Prince and Bach as contradictory. There are clear similarities in their use of structure. For that reason I would never think of putting Prince with Chopin or Wagner... We need to be more open not just to what a piece of art says but how it says it. It is possible to divide our senses between acoustic works and staged works and I am just as pleased for people to get close to my work on CD as to see it in a theatre or hear it in a concert hall. And I am lucky because my audience brings many ways of seeing and hearing – they come from different fields, from literature, visual arts, improvisatory to contemporary music, theatre, film, and some from none of these at all, just completely unprepared. That is best of all."

It's an important year for Heiner Goebbels. He's just celebrated his 50th birthday and Frankfurt has awarded him the Goethe-Plakette prize for his contribution to contemporary music. The ideal birthday present, he says, would be an extra year.

He's working night and day on the opera commission, and there's a new work for the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle and all the birthday concerts and celebrations, as well as concert tours. But he's content at 50. "I have no regrets and I appreciate the continuity in my creative life. OK I didn't used to compose, I didn't used to direct – those areas have developed – but the people I work with have come with me, my way of working has evolved with them. Yes, I am quite a happy person."

'Surrogate Cities', 30 August 7.30pm. Tickets 0131 473 2000. CDs of Goebbels's work are available on the ECM label including 'Surrogate Cities' and, released on Monday, 'Eislermaterial'