Gottfried Michael Koenig

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

Koenig studied church music in Braunschweig at the Niedersächsische Musikschule Braunschweig (), composition, piano, analysis and acoustics at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, music representation techniques at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and computer technique at the University of Bonn. He attended and later lectured at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (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 Mauricio Kagel, Franco Evangelisti, György Ligeti (Artikulation), Herbert Brün and (with the realization of Gesang der Jünglinge and ).

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 Koenig moved to the Netherlands, where he taught at Utrecht University and was, until 1986, director and later chairman of the electronic music studio, which became the Institute of Sonology (Frobenius 2001). 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. Among his notable students are Mario Bertoncini, Konrad Boehmer, Karl Gottfried Brunotte, Johannes Fritsch, Annea Lockwood, Tomás Marco, Pierre Mariétan, Zoltán Pongrácz, Kees van Prooijen, Atli Heimir Sveinsson, Miguel Ángel Coria and Jan Vriend. See: List of music students by teacher: K to M#Gottfried Michael Koenig.