Uploaded November 2010 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
René Koering was born in 1940 in Alsace, and studied music at Strasbourg Conservatoire, where he took courses in composition, piano and oboe. It was Pierre Boulez who advised him to study with Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt in 1960. From 1965 on the most important European festivals, starting appropriately enough with Strasbourg, premiered Koering's works. He refined his approach and musical language in the early 1970s, refusing the scene that opened up before/ so-called avant-garde works, and preferring to project his music selflessly toward the listener. From then on he developed the permanent link that is necessarily forged between art and the individual, no matter what their role and place in today's society. His musical language, rather than making a break with the past, sought instead to take it into account -- in his own way, naturally.—and to share the style of the past. Among those styles to be echoed in his own writing one may mention bel canto (from earliest to latest, from Bellini to Puccini), Liszt the virtuoso (his Etudes de'exécution transcendante) and the meditative (the nocturne Schloflos -- Frage und Antwort) as well as post-romanticism and the resulting school of Vienna [i.e., the Second Viennese School). René Koering, devoured by an insatiable curiosity, has tried his hand at the main musical genres: chamber music (three string quartets), concertante music (Fragments de songe, Concerto pour violon), symphonic music (three symphonies), opera (Eleneur, La Lune vague, Avila) and Marie de Montpellier) as well as electroacoustic music, the "Concerts-Match" and the musical performance Hier, Aujourd'hui, Demain in which techno music joins the symphony orchestra.
"The Second String Quartet was imposed on me by Harry Halbrecht (who, moreover, would be the same "tormentor" for other works), and intended, in its initial form, for the Parennin Quartet before seeing the exceptional Arditti Quartet take it up in a new version for La Fenice in Venice, where it was confronted in the same concert with Boulez and Carter. The real technical difficulty of this quartet would hinder certain concert attempts."
René Koering
René Koering was born in 1940 in Alsace, and studied music at Strasbourg Conservatoire, where he took courses in composition, piano and oboe. It was Pierre Boulez who advised him to study with Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt in 1960. From 1965 on the most important European festivals, starting appropriately enough with Strasbourg, premiered Koering's works. He refined his approach and musical language in the early 1970s, refusing the scene that opened up before/ so-called avant-garde works, and preferring to project his music selflessly toward the listener. From then on he developed the permanent link that is necessarily forged between art and the individual, no matter what their role and place in today's society. His musical language, rather than making a break with the past, sought instead to take it into account -- in his own way, naturally.—and to share the style of the past. Among those styles to be echoed in his own writing one may mention bel canto (from earliest to latest, from Bellini to Puccini), Liszt the virtuoso (his Etudes de'exécution transcendante) and the meditative (the nocturne Schloflos -- Frage und Antwort) as well as post-romanticism and the resulting school of Vienna [i.e., the Second Viennese School). René Koering, devoured by an insatiable curiosity, has tried his hand at the main musical genres: chamber music (three string quartets), concertante music (Fragments de songe, Concerto pour violon), symphonic music (three symphonies), opera (Eleneur, La Lune vague, Avila) and Marie de Montpellier) as well as electroacoustic music, the "Concerts-Match" and the musical performance Hier, Aujourd'hui, Demain in which techno music joins the symphony orchestra.
"The Second String Quartet was imposed on me by Harry Halbrecht (who, moreover, would be the same "tormentor" for other works), and intended, in its initial form, for the Parennin Quartet before seeing the exceptional Arditti Quartet take it up in a new version for La Fenice in Venice, where it was confronted in the same concert with Boulez and Carter. The real technical difficulty of this quartet would hinder certain concert attempts."
René Koering
