Having grown up in the avant-garde tradition of Webern, Nono and Wolfgang Hufschmidt, as well as John Cage and Dieter Schnebel, Jörg Iwer has intensively explored the compositional techniques employed by Mahler, Ives, Satie, Eisler and Schostakowitsch. A further source of inspiration include jazz composers and the music of Frank Zappa. An important objective of his endeavors as a composer is to create works which are spontaneously accessible upon first hearing. The oftentimes simply structured façade of his compositions harbors techniques which were introduced to serious music by Mahler and Ives, and which are employed in particular by DJs in today's pop culture: inflections of contextual associations combined with fragments or larger constituents of "familiar" timbres. In short, he composes "music about music".

Jörg Iwer's works include two operas, his oratorio "... but had no love ...", two symphonies, concerts for violin and percussion and musical fairytales for children and adults, as well as smaller works and a large number of arrangements and instrumentations of, amongst others, Bach's "Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch" and "Songs and Dances of Death" by M. P. Mussorgski. A large portion of his works were composed under contract for significant cultural institutions such as theaters, the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival, the city of Wittenberg and EXPO 2000. The children's piece, "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten", is available on CD as part of the Ravensburger series "Kinderwelt" (children's world).