Artist Resumé

My life-long artistic pursuits, most of them based on working with the digital computer, include music, poetry, and more recently work with digital images. The need to express myself is ongoing, and that need is focused on FLOW. I have combined music and poetry, not just my own, many times, as shown in the repertory of compositions on the site. To link music and images is a new endeavor of mine that started in 2009.

All of my life, I have been fascinated by both the artistic process itself and its results, and even more in the link between the two. This linkage is the topic of my cognitive musicology. Despite of this, the emphasis on this site is on outcomes and results, not writings.

I am known mostly as a musician and musicologist even though my earliest work is in poetry, first in the German, later in the English, language (1955-1995). I started music composition on my own in the 1960s, inspired by the "new music" I heard and heard explained in Darmstadt, Germany, the country I lived in after my flight from Silesia in 1945 where I was born (1936). As a writer, in the early seventies I combined theoretical and esthetic interests and pioneered a new science, cognitive musicology, a topic I have written about for 25 years (1969-1994).

An essential role in my musical life was played by my first composition teacher, Konrad Lechner (1911-1989) who taught me micro-counterpoint, an approach to composition I transferred to electronic music (see the German article "Hommage to K. Lechner"). This transfer permitted me to use compositional tools based on computer programs, especially G.M. Koenig's Project One Program for interpretative composition (1967). The disciplined freedom Koenig's program bestowed on me enabled me to capture my intuitions, whether of syntax, tone color, poetic feeling, form and, indirectly, images, in a systematic way. Koenig's program gave rise to the notion of the computer as the artist's Alter Ego to which I still subscribe, even in my visual work.