Process and Form: Selected Writings on Music by Gottfried Michael Koenig

Reviewed by: Process and Form: Selected Writings on Music by Gottfried Michael Koenig Valentina Bertolani Process and Form: Selected Writings on Music. By Gottfried Michael Koenig. Edited by Kees Tazelaar. Translated by Richard Barrett. Hofheim: Wolke, 2018. [315 p. ISBN 9783955930905 (paperback), €32.] Illustrations, editor's note, author's note, translator's note, preface, discography, index. [End Page 592] This volume, edited by Dutch composer Kees Tazelaar, gathers essays and interviews by the German composer and theorist Gottfried Michael Koenig. The texts are translated into English and cover a broad period of over fifty years up to 2001, a time that is rich in changes and developments for electronic music and compositional theory, such as the capital passage from electronic composition in the studio to digital composition on one's personal computer. The first texts date back to a time when the study of electronic music was limited to "three available records and one score" (p. 277, from the essay "Via electronica"). Nowadays, we are far removed from early available works, and many more discoveries in the field of electronics have been carried out, with performers and composers exploring technologies and practices that were unimaginable in the 1950s. Also, studies of electronic music and its history are on the increase. Koenig's work and ideas are yet to be thoroughly investigated, however, especially in Anglophone scholarship. Thus, this book is incredibly welcome. Not only does it provide the chance to deepen the understanding of this author and revisit the canonical history of electronic music through the many connections that emerge from the texts, it also serves as a sort of compositional handbook detailing aesthetic and technical aspects of the compositional work and its changes through time. In short, the book is one of those publications for which the average reader might not have felt the need (with exception of scholars directly interested in Koenig, obviously) but which has such an interesting content that many readers will wonder why it was not compiled much earlier. The volume is a mix of various types of texts from different periods and presenting different writing styles: from notes to self, to interviews, to lessons and essays, to pointed analyses of the history of electronic music. This variety of forms calls for a broad readership. The texts selected here are not only invaluable for the scholar of the history of electronic music but will also be of interest to young composers and performers who might want to reflect on what is important for their creative life. Moreover, the book is full of prompts that composition teachers can use in class, both in practical and theoretical settings. The combination of scholarly and pedagogical attitudes is no accident and reflects the reason why the editor initiated work on Koenig's writings. In fact, Tazeelar wanted to use some of Koenig's texts as models for his own teaching (p. 7). It is only natural then that this triple readership (scholars, composition teachers, and composition students) emerges so evidently from the selection. Most of the texts in the volume are translated into English for the first time, and this would have been reason enough for this publication. But the themes that emerge contribute to some of the most recent conversations in electronic music. Indeed, neither the author nor the editor shies away from facing the question of the timeliness of a book that contains texts from fifty years ago. This timeliness is not immediate or obvious. As pointed out by Koenig himself, "It should be difficult nowadays to imagine a work environment where sounds had to be laboriously constructed with generators, tape loops, rulers and scissors" (p. 11). The answer is in a useful and intelligent preface written by the Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione, who rightly points out that the lasting relevance of Koenig's work lies in the clear explanations of the concepts that inform his aesthetics and that transcend time. Vaggione's invitation to reflect on [End Page 593] the concept of rules and its specific meaning to Koenig as well as to the concept of emergence helps make these texts useful and inspirational for a new generation of composers, who work in a completely changed...