Gottfried Michael Koenig (born 1926 in Magdeburg) is a contemporary German-Dutch composer. 1926 (MCMXXVI) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ...

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). Christian music is music created by or adapted for the Christian church. ... Braunschweig (historic English name Brunswick, Low Saxon Brunswiek) is a city of 245,500 people (as of December 31, 2004), located in Lower Saxony, Germany. ... Detmold is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, with a population of about 80,000. ... Köln redirects here. ... Bonn is a city in Germany (19th largest), in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, located about 20 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the north of the Siebengebirge. ... The Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR) is a public broadcaster in the German Bundesland North Rhine-Westphalia with its main office is in Köln. ... Mauricio Kagel (born Buenos Aires, December 24, 1931) is an Argentine composer who has lived in Germany for most of his career. ... György Sándor Ligeti (May 28, 1923 – June 12, 2006) was a Jewish Hungarian composer born in Romania who later became an Austrian citizen. ... Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928) is a contemporary composer. ... Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the young men) is a noted electronic music work by Karlheinz Stockhausen created in 1955-56. ...

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. Categories: Physics stubs | Physics ... Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music. ...

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). Five volumes of his theoretical writings were published between 1991 and 2002 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: Zufall und Notwendigkeit. Anmerkungen zu Gottfried Michael Koenigs Streichquartett 1959 vor dem Hintergrund seiner kompositionstheoretischen Untersuchungen.