Born 1966 in Cologne, he studied composition at New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and at Columbia University in New York where he completed his doctorate in composition with Tristan Murail in 2002. From 2002-2004 he worked in Paris as a “compositeur en recherche” at IRCAM. The focus of Oliver Schneller’s compositional work lies in the creation of works which combine musical instruments, architectural spaces, and live computer processing. Often his works include spatial parameters such as particular combinations of instruments and loud speakers distributed throughout the performance space. As a saxophonist active in both the classical repertoire and jazz, he has performed with the George Russell Bigband, with John Zorn, Tan Dun, the Tanglewood Symphony Orchestra, and the Gustav Mahler Youth Symphony under Seiji Ozawa.

He has won multiple awards, including the Rome-Prize of the German Academy, the 2010 Siemens Prize for Composition, and the Edgar-Varèse-Guest-Professorship of Technical University Berlin. His compositional works have been presented at numerous leading international music festivals by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, musikFabrik, Orchestre National de France, Beijing Symphony, among many others. From 2015 to 2019 he served as a tenured professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, where he was also the director of the Eastman Audio Research Center. In 2019 he was appointed Professor of Composition at the Robert Schumann Conservatory of Music in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he also founded the SoundCube, a laboratory for experimental music and spatialized sound.