Gottfried Michael Koenig
Gottfried Michael Koenig was a German-Dutch composer.
Biography
Born in Magdeburg, Koenig studied church music in Braunschweig at the, followed by musical composition, piano, analysis, and acoustics at the Hochschule für [Musik Detmold]. He continued his studies in music representation techniques at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and computer technique at the University of Bonn. Koenig attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and later served there as a lecturer.From 1954 to 1964, Koenig worked in the Studio for [Electronic Music (WDR)|electronic studio] of West German Radio (WDR), where he produced his electronic compositions Klangfiguren, Essay and Terminus 1, and wrote chamber and orchestral music. During this period, he also assisted other composers, including Mauricio Kagel, Franco Evangelisti, György Ligeti, Herbert Brün and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
From 1961 to 1965, Koenig taught at the Gaudeamus Foundation in Bilthoven, and from 1962 to 1964 at the Hochschule für Musik Köln. In 1964 he moved to the Netherlands, where he taught at Utrecht University and was, until 1986, director and later chairman of the electronic music studio. There he developed his computer composition programs Project 1 and Project 2, designed to formalise the composition of musical structure-variants. Both programs had a significant impact on the development of algorithmic composition systems.
His sound synthesis program SSP 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. These were followed by the application of his computer programs, resulting in chamber music and works for orchestra.
Koenig later taught Algorithmic Composition in 2002/03 at Technische Universität Berlin.