A long-time professor of music at the University of Cambridge, Goehr influenced many notable contemporary composers, including Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson, George Benjamin and Robin Holloway.

Goehr emerged as a central figure in the Manchester School of post-war British composers, including Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, in his early twenties.

Back in England and working for the BBC, he experienced an international breakthrough in 1957 with his cantata The Deluge in 1957, conducted by his father Walter Goehr.

He combined avant-garde techniques with elements from music history in works of many genres including the Piano Trio (1966), his first opera, Arden Must Die (1966), the music-theatre piece Triptych (1968–70), the orchestral Metamorphosis/Dance (1974), and the String Quartet No.

[6] He became friends there with Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, trumpeter Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon.

[5] A seminal event in Goehr's development was hearing the UK premiere of Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony in 1953,[4] conducted by his father.

[10] Eventually Goehr left pure serialism, which he came to consider a cult modelled after twelve-tone works by Anton Webern, forbidding references to any other music: Choice, taste and style were dirty words; personal style, one could argue, is necessarily a product of repetition, and the removal of repetition is, or was believed to be, a cornerstone of classical serialism as defined by Webern's late works [...] All this may well be seen as a kind of negative style precept: a conscious elimination of sensuous, dramatic or expressive elements, indeed of everything that in the popular view constitutes music.

[11]Upon his return to Britain, Goehr experienced an international breakthrough as a composer with the performance of his cantata The Deluge in 1957, conducted by his father.

It was regarded "to have more harmonic coherence and considerably more dramatic impact than most serial music of the time", as his obituary in The Telegraph noted.

Goehr listened to criticism and described his position: If one wishes, one can just say that music has to be autonomous and self sufficient; but how to sustain such a view when people who sing for pleasure are deprived of true satisfaction in the performance of new work?

It is based upon a chord-sequence derived from music from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, "Catacombæ" and "Cum mortuis in lingua mortua", of which his father had written a harmonic analysis.

[4] Goehr founded the Wardour Castle Summer School in Wiltshire with Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle in 1964, which led to a focus on opera and music theatre.

[7] His students included some of England's most notable composers to come, such as Thomas Adès,[4] Julian Anderson,[5] George Benjamin and Robin Holloway.

[7] In 1976, Goehr composed Psalm IV in a "bright modal sonority",[3] in a departure from serialism, towards more transparent sounds.

[16] He described his process for Arianna: The impression I aim to create is one of transparency: the listener should perceive, both in the successive and simultaneous dimensions of the score, the old beneath the new and the new arising from the old.

[3] Although the last fifteen years of Goehr's output received less coverage in both academic analysis and performances, they represent an interesting phase of his work.

[3] A set of piano pieces, Symmetry Disor.der Reach, recalling a Baroque suite, was premiered bv Huw Watkins in 2007.

[3] After a hiatus of almost ten years, Goehr returned to opera again with Promised End (2008–09), based on Shakespeare's King Lear.

To These Dark Steps/The Fathers are Watching was written for tenor, children's choir and ensemble in 2011–12,[3] setting texts by the Israeli poet Gabriel Levin about the bombing of the Gaza Strip during the Iraq War; it was premiered in a concert of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Knussen marking Goehr's 80th birthday.

[5] Examples include The Deluge (1957–58), which was inspired by Eisenstein's notes for a film, itself based on a writing by Leonardo da Vinci.

Other works' inspirations range from the formal proportions of a late Beethoven piano sonata (Metamorphosis/Dance, 1973–74) to a painting by Goya (Colossus or Panic, 1990), to the sinister humour of Bertolt Brecht (Arden Must Die, 1966) or to the Japanese Noh theatre (Kantan and Damask Drum, 1999).

The cantata The Death of Moses resonates with Schoenberg's unfinished Moses und Aron; the opera Arianna (1995) is the setting of the libretto of a lost opera by Monteverdi, and posthumously published prose fragments by Franz Kafka inspired or appear in Das Gesetz der Quadrille (1979).

[5] Goehr remained indebted to Messiaen, apparent in his lifelong commitment to modality as an integration of serialism and tonality, as well as in melodic writing inspired by bird-song.