Gerhard R. Koch

Gerhard R. Koch (* 1939 in Bonn ) is a German music critic and cultural journalist.

Live and act

Koch, who had lived in Frankfurt am Main since 1952 , was already writing small reviews for the local section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a student at Goethe Gymnasium , including about church concerts. From 1960 he studied German, philosophy, history and sociology in Frankfurt. Here he was mainly influenced by Theodor W. Adorno's ideas on music theory .

From 1975 until his retirement in 2003, Koch was part of the editorial team of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and was responsible for the music division. The main focus of his journalistic work was music theater and new music , as well as the related record criticism. However, he also wrote about film, theater, and dance.

Koch has been giving laudatory speech since 2003, including the awarding of the Goethe Medal by the Goethe Institute to György Ligeti in 2003, the Leipzig Bach plaque awarded to Gustav Leonhardt in the same year and the Giga-Hertz Prize to Natasha Barrett in 2008 He writes reviews and reports for the new music newspaper (nmz), among others , and also for the FAZ, and he gives lectures and lectures on music-specific topics.

In 1999 he was honored with the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize for literary criticism and essay and in 2005 with the Goethe plaque from the city of Frankfurt am Main .

Koch lives in Kelkheim - Fischbach . He is married to the singer, founder and director of the ensemble <belcanto> and singing teacher Dietburg Spohr.

Fonts

• with Udo Bermbach, Dieter Borchmeyer, Hermann Danuser: Regietheater , Königshausen & Neumann, 2005 ISBN 978-3-82603285-1 .
• with Frieder Reininghaus, Ariane Bliss: Der ferne Haydn, The Invention of the Musical Experiment , Studio Point, 2011 ISBN 978-3-89564135-0 .
• with Johannes Fritsch, Winrich Hopp: Feedback Studio , Kunststiftung NRW (ed.), Dohr ISBN 978-3-93665584-1 .

literature

• Nike Wagner : music thinker, music essayist , laudation for Gerhard R. Koch. In: Michael Assmann (Ed.): German Academy for Language and Poetry , Yearbook 1999, Wallstein Verlag, 2000 ISBN 978-3-89244376-6 , pp. 132 ff.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhard R. Koch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Gerhard Schroth: (PDF; 318 kB) Born to hear, ordered to write Gerhard R. Koch is 70 years old . In Taunus-Kurier 2/2009
• Short biography Schott-Verlag, Mainz

Individual evidence

1. ↑ new music newspaper
2. ↑ Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.