Following his secondary schooling at Frankfurt's noted Goethe Gymnasium, where a classmate was the later émigré author Richard Plant, Heiden enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin in 1929 at the age of nineteen and studied music composition under Paul Hindemith,[2] one of the foremost German composers of the twentieth century.

In 1934 Heiden married pianist Cola de Joncheere, who had been a classmate at the Hochschule für Musik.

In 1935 they left Nazi Germany and emigrated to Detroit, where Heiden taught at the Art Center Music School for eight years.

That year he joined the faculty of the Indiana University School of Music, where he served as chair of the Composition Department until 1974.

Much of Heiden's music is for either wind or string chamber groups or solo instruments with piano, though he also wrote two symphonies, an opera (The Darkened City), a ballet ("Dreamers on a Slack Wire"), and vocal and incidental music for poetry and several of Shakespeare's plays.