He worked as a music critic for Allgemeine Musikzeitung from 1911 to 1917 before becoming a theater Kapellmeister and composer for Volksbühne in 1918.
He also co-founded the German division of the International Society for Contemporary Music and served as conductor of the Junger Chor.
During the Third Reich, his music was classified as "undesirable" by the Nazi authorities, and after World War II, he almost completely stopped composing.
From 1946 to 1949 he directed the city Konservatorium and beginning in 1955, he headed the department of composition and theory at the Berliner Musikhochschule.
From 1918 onwards his musical idiom inclined more towards an individual form of Expressionism, to which his many theatre scores contributed in evolving a highly dramatic, free-form style.