Gottfried Michael Koenig

Gottfried Michael Koenig (born October 5, 1926 in Magdeburg) is a contemporary German-Dutch composer.

He studied church music in Braunschweig, composition, piano, analysis and acoustics in Detmold, music representation techniques in Cologne and computer technique in Bonn. He attended and later lectured at the Darmstadt music summer schools. From 1954 to 1964 Koenig worked in the electronic studio of West German Radio (WDR) producing his electronic compositions "Klangfiguren", "Essay" and "Terminus 1" and wrote orchestral and chamber music. Furthermore he assisted other composers, including Kagel, Evangelisti, Ligeti, Brün and Stockhausen (with the realization of "Kontakte" and "Gesang der Jünglinge").

In 1964 Koenig moved to the Netherlands, where he was, until 1986, director and later chairman of the Institute of Sonology at the University of Utrecht. Here he developed his computer composition programs "Project 1" (1964) and "Project 2" (1966), designed to formalise the composition of musical structure-variants. Both programs had a significant impact on the further development of algorithmic composition systems.

His sound synthesis program "SSP" (started 1971) is based on the representation of sound as a sequence of amplitudes in time. It makes use of the methods of aleatoric and groupwise selection of elements employed in "Project 1" and "Project 2". He continued to produce electronic works ("Terminus 2", the "Funktionen" series). These were followed by the application of his computer programs, resulting in chamber music ("Übung" for piano, the "Segmente" series, "3 ASKO Pieces", "String Quartet 1987", "String Trio") and works for orchestra ("Beitrag", "Concerti e Corali"). Six volumes of his theoretical writings were published between 1991 and 2008 under the title "Ästhetische Praxis" by Pfau Verlag; an Italian selection appeared under the title "Genesi e forma" (Semar, Rome 1995).

External links

*http://www.koenigproject.nl - Koenig's own page
* Karlheinz Essl: " [http://www.essl.at/bibliogr/koenig-strq.html Zufall und Notwendigkeit. Anmerkungen zu Gottfried Michael Koenigs Streichquartett 1959 vor dem Hintergrund seiner kompositionstheoretischen Untersuchungen.] "