Gottfried Michael Koenig (5 October 1926 – 30 December 2021)
"In Memoriam Gottfried Michael Koenig"
by Roland Kuit, , 4 January 2022 was a contemporary German-Dutch composer.
Biography
Born in Magdeburg
Magdeburg (; nds, label=Low Saxon, Meideborg ) is the capital and second-largest city of the German state Saxony-Anhalt. The city is situated at the Elbe river.
Otto I, the first Holy Roman Emperor and founder of the Archdiocese of Magdebur ...
, Koenig studied church music
Church music is Christian music written for performance in church, or any musical setting of ecclesiastical liturgy, or music set to words expressing propositions of a sacred nature, such as a hymn.
History
Early Christian music
The onl ...
in Braunschweig
Braunschweig () or Brunswick ( , from Low German ''Brunswiek'' , Braunschweig dialect: ''Bronswiek'') is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany, north of the Harz Mountains at the farthest navigable point of the river Oker, which connects it to the Nor ...
at the , composition
Composition or Compositions may refer to:
Arts and literature
*Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography
*Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include v ...
, piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...
, analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...
and acoustics
Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...
at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold
The Hochschule für Musik Detmold is a university-level music school situated in Detmold, Germany.
Academics
The Hochschule offers performance degrees in composition, all orchestral instruments, piano, voice, opera, art-song, conducting, as we ...
, music representation techniques at the Hochschule für Musik Köln
' (, plural: ') is the generic term in German for institutions of higher education, corresponding to ''universities'' and ''colleges'' in English. The term ''Universität'' (plural: ''Universitäten'') is reserved for institutions with the right to ...
and computer technique at the University of Bonn
The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine U ...
. He attended and later lectured at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse
Darmstädter Ferienkurse ("Darmstadt Summer Course") is a regular summer event of contemporary classical music in Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany. It was founded in 1946, under the name "Ferienkurse für Internationale Neue Musik Darmstadt" (Vacation Cou ...
(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
An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families.
There are typically four main sections of instruments:
* bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, ce ...
and chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small numb ...
. Furthermore, he assisted other composers, including Mauricio Kagel
Mauricio Raúl Kagel (; 24 December 1931 – 18 September 2008) was an Argentine-German composer.
Biography
Kagel was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family that had fled from Russia in the 1920s . He studied music, his ...
, Franco Evangelisti, György Ligeti
György Sándor Ligeti (; ; 28 May 1923 – 12 June 2006) was a Hungarian-Austrian composer of contemporary classical music. He has been described as "one of the most important avant-garde composers in the latter half of the twentieth century" ...
('' Artikulation''), Herbert Brün Herbert Brün (July 9, 1918 – November 6, 2000) was a composer, pioneer of electronic and computer music, and cybernetician. Born in Berlin, Germany, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1962 until he retired, several ...
and Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...
(with the realization of ''Gesang der Jünglinge
''Gesang der Jünglinge'' (literally "Song of the Youths") is an electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was realized in 1955–56 at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne and is Work Number 8 in the composer's catalog. The voc ...
'' and ''Kontakte
''Kontakte'' ("Contacts") is an electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen, realized in 1958–60 at the ''Westdeutscher Rundfunk'' (WDR) electronic-music studio in Cologne with the assistance of Gottfried Michael Koenig. The score is Nr. 12 ...
'').
From 1961 to 1965 Koenig taught at the Gaudeamus Foundation
The Gaudeamus Foundation and Contemporary Music Center organizes and promotes contemporary musical activities and concerts in the Netherlands and abroad. It focuses on supporting the career development of young composers and musicians, particula ...
in Bilthoven
Bilthoven is a village in the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is a part of the municipality of De Bilt. It has a railway station with connections to Utrecht, Amersfoort and Baarn. It is home to the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health a ...
, and from 1962 to 1964 at the Hochschule für Musik Köln. In 1964 Koenig moved to the Netherlands, where he taught at Utrecht University
Utrecht University (UU; nl, Universiteit Utrecht, formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2018, it had an enrollme ...
and was, until 1986, director and later chairman of the electronic music studio, which became the Institute of Sonology The Institute of Sonology is an education and research center for electronic music and computer music based at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague in the Netherlands.
Background
The institute was founded at Utrecht University in 1960 under the n ...
. 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
Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music.
Algorithms (or, at the very least, formal sets of rules) have been used to compose music for centuries; the procedures used to plot voice-leading in Western counterpoin ...
systems. Among his notable students are Jorge Antunes, Mario Bertoncini
Mario Bertoncini (27 September 1932, in Rome – 19 January 2019, in Siena) was an Italian composer, pianist, and music educator. In 1962 he was awarded the Nicola d'Atri Prize by the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia for his ''Sei Pezzi per ...
, Konrad Boehmer
Konrad Boehmer (24 May 1941 – 4 October 2014) was a German-Dutch composer, educator, and writer.
Life
Boehmer was born in Berlin. A self-declared member of the Darmstadt School, he studied composition in Cologne with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Go ...
, Karl Gottfried Brunotte, Miguel Ángel Coria
Miguel Ángel Coria Varela (born 24 October 1937 – 24 February 2016) was a Spanish composer of classical music. His early work showed affinities to the music of Anton Webern, but he became increasingly influenced by Impressionism. From 1973 he e ...
, Johannes Fritsch
Johannes Georg Fritsch (27 July 1941 – 29 April 2010) was a German composer.
At the age of seven, Fritsch found a violin in the attic of his uncle's house in Bensheim-Auerbach, Germany, and began lessons with a village music teacher named Kna ...
, Annea Lockwood
Annea Lockwood (born July 29, 1939, in Christchurch, New Zealand) is a New Zealand-born American composer and academic musician. She taught electronic music at Vassar College. Her work often involves recordings of natural found sounds. She has a ...
, Luca Lombardi, Tomás Marco
Tomás Marco Aragón (born 12 September 1942) is a Spanish composer and writer on music.
Life and work
Marco was born in Madrid where he later studied violin and composition, while at the same time pursuing the study of law (he received his li ...
, Pierre Mariétan, Zoltán Pongrácz, Kees van Prooijen Kees (Cornelis) van Prooijen (born 7 August 1952) is a creator of computer art. Although it does not bear his name, he independently discovered the Bohlen-Pierce scale, a non- octave-repeating scale based on the tritave and spectra containing odd ...
, Atli Heimir Sveinsson
Atli Heimir Sveinsson (21 September 1938 – 20 April 2019) was an Icelandic composer.
Atli Heimir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland and started piano lessons at the age of 10. He studied piano with Rögnvaldur Sigurjónsson at the Reykjavík Coll ...
, Claude Vivier
Claude Vivier ( ; baptised as Claude Roger; 14 April 19487 March 1983) was a Canadian contemporary composer, pianist, poet and ethnomusicologist of Québécois origin. After studying with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, Vivier became an i ...
and Jan Vriend
Jan Vriend (born November 1938 in Benningbroek) is a Dutch classical music composer, Conductor (music), conductor, organist and pianist. He lives in Gloucestershire, England since 1984.
Studies and career
Vriend studied at the Amsterdam Conservato ...
.
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
Aleatoricism or aleatorism, the noun associated with the adjectival aleatory and aleatoric, is a term popularised by the musical composer Pierre Boulez, but also Witold Lutosławski and Franco Evangelisti, for compositions resulting from "action ...
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'' (Rome: Semar, 1995), an English one under the title ''Process and Form'' (Hofheim: Wolke, 2018). Koenig taught Algorithmic Composition in 2002/03 at the Technical University of Berlin
The Technical University of Berlin (official name both in English and german: link=no, Technische Universität Berlin, also known as TU Berlin and Berlin Institute of Technology) is a public research university located in Berlin, Germany. It was ...
. His works ''Terminus 2'' and ''Funktion Grün'' were selected by the British magazine ''The Wire
''The Wire'' is an American Crime film, crime drama Television show, television series created and primarily written by author and former police reporter David Simon. The series was broadcast by the cable network HBO in the United States. ''The ...
'' in 1998 for its list of .
References
Works cited
*
Further reading
* Berg, Paul. 2009. "Composing Sound Structures with Rules". ''Contemporary Music Review'' 28, no. 1 (February): 75–87.
* Boehmer, Konrad. 2002. "Koenig—Sound Composition—Essay". ''Electroacoustic Music: Analytical Perspectives'', edited by Thomas Licata, 59–71. Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance 63. Westport: Greenwood. .
* Boehmer, Konrad. 2006. "Doppelter Ausbruch: Über die Streichquartette 1959 und 1987 von Gottfried Michael Koenig". ''Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
'Die'' (; en, " heNew Journal of Music") is a music magazine, co-founded in Leipzig by Robert Schumann, his teacher and future father-in law Friedrich Wieck, and his close friend Ludwig Schuncke. Its first issue appeared on 3 April 1834.
Histo ...
'' 167, no. 2 (March–April): 29–31.
* Essl, Karlheinz. 1989. "Zufall und Notwendigkeit. Anmerkungen zu Gottfried Michael Koenigs Streichquartett 1959 vor dem Hintergrund seiner kompositionstheoretischen Überlegungen". In ''Musik-Konzepte 66: Gottfried Michael Koenig'', edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger
Heinz-Klaus Metzger (6 February 1932 – 25 October 2009) was a German music critic and theorist.
Born in Konstanz, Metzger studied piano under Carl Seemann in Freiburg im Breisgau and composition under Max Deutsch in Paris. Later, he met Theod ...
and Rainer Riehn Rainer Riehn (12 November 1941 – 9 June 2015) was a German composer and conductor, and a co-editor of music theory magazines.
Riehn was born in Danzig, Germany (modern Gdańsk, Poland) studied music theory in Mainz, Zürich, and Berlin and c ...
, 35–76. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik.
* Fricke, Stefan. 2004. ''Gottfried Michael Koenig: Parameter und Protokolle seiner Musik''. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag. .
* Griffiths, Paul. 2002. "Koenig, Gottfried Michael". ''The Oxford Companion to Music'', edited by Alison Latham. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Kennedy, Michael. 2006. ''The Oxford Dictionary of Music''. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, and Rainer Riehn Rainer Riehn (12 November 1941 – 9 June 2015) was a German composer and conductor, and a co-editor of music theory magazines.
Riehn was born in Danzig, Germany (modern Gdańsk, Poland) studied music theory in Mainz, Zürich, and Berlin and c ...
(eds.). 1989. ''Gottfried Michael Koenig''. Musik-Konzepte 66. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik. .
* Ungeheuer, Elena. 1998. "Analoge Handschriften: Kompositorische Facetten des Kölner Studios für Elektronische Musik in den fünfziger Jahren". In ''Vorträge und Berichte vom KlangArt-Kongreß 1995 an der Universität Osnabrück, Fachbereich Erziehungs- und Kulturwissenschaften'', edited by Bernd Enders
Bernd Enders (born 9 September 1947) is a German musicologist and from 1994 until his emeritus in 2015, University Professor for Systematic Musicology at the University of Osnabrück.
Life
Born in Siegen, Enders studied at the and at the Hoch ...
and Niels Knolle, 83–95. Musik und Technologie 1. Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch. .
* Ungeheuer, Elena. 2000a. "Essay oder ein interaktiver Versuch zum Umgang mit Musik und Musikwissenschaft". In ''Musikkonzepte—Konzepte der Musikwissenschaft'', 2 vols., edited by Kathrin Eberl and Wolfgang Ruf Wolfgang Ruf (born 29 August 1941) is a German musicologist and emeritus professor.
Life
Born in Radolfzell, Ruf studied musicology and history at the University of Freiburg, and obtained his doctorate in 1974. Until 1985 he was a research assis ...
, 393–401. Kassel: Bärenreiter. .
* Ungeheuer, Elena. 2000b. "From the Elements to the Continuum: Timbre Composition in Early Electronic Music". ''Contemporary Music Review'' 10, no. 2:25–33.
* Tazelaar, Kees. 2013. "On the Threshold of Beauty: Philips and the Origins of Electronic Music in the Netherlands 1925–1965", chapters 10 and 12.
* Zey, Claudia Maria. 2000. "Die digitale spektrographisch basierte Visualisierung und Analyse der elektronischen Musik Gottfried Michael Koenigs am Beispiel der Komposition Essay – Komposition für elektronische Klänge (1957)". In ''Musik im virtuellen Raum: KlangArt-Kongreß 1997'', edited by Bernd Enders and Joachim Stange-Elbe, 329–64. Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch. .
External links
*
* Karlheinz Essl
Karlheinz Essl (born 15 August 1960) is an Austrian composer, performer, sound artist, improviser, and composition teacher.
Biography
Essl was born in Vienna. His studies at the University of Music in Vienna included: composition (under Friedr ...
"Garlands to Koenig"
essl.at
{{DEFAULTSORT:Koenig, Gottfried Michael
1926 births
2021 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Twelve-tone and serial composers
Experimental composers
German classical composers
Dutch male classical composers
Dutch classical composers
German male classical composers
Dutch people of German descent
Musicians from Magdeburg
21st-century classical composers
20th-century German composers
21st-century German composers
20th-century German male musicians
21st-century German male musicians