Godfried-Willem Raes
Biography
Godfried-Willem Raes, born in Gent (Europe)
January 3th 1952, is known worldwide as a 'music maker' in the largest sense
of the word: as a concert-organizer he's been responsible from 1973 until 1988
for the new-music concert programming of the Philharmonic Society at the Palais
des Beaux Arts in Brussels, in addition to which he also organized and still
organizes all the concerts which take place at the Logos Foundation in Gent,
in total about 150 international new music concerts a year. Over a timespan
of over 50 years he turned the Logos Foundation into the most innovative new
music organization in Flanders. As a composer/performer and instrumentmaker
he is the founder of the Logos- Group (1968), out of which grew the Logos
Duo, with Moniek Darge as well as the well known experimental Logos
Robot orchestra , operating with his 70 spectacular musical robots.
Godfried-Willem Raes studied musicology and philosophy at the Ghent State University
as well as piano, clarinet, percussion and composition at the Royal Conservatory
of Music of Gent.
He has also published a great number of critical essays and articles in specialized
publications. In 1982 he received the Louis Paul Boon Award for the social engagement
in his artistic work. In 1988 he became a professor of music composition at
the Ghent Royal Conservatory. In
1997 he also became a professor at the Orpheus
Higher Institute for Music, a commitment he held, up to 2009. In 1990 he
designed and constructed a tetrahedron-shaped
concert-hall for the Logos Foundation in Ghent, a project for which it received
the Tech-Art prize 1990.
Next to his reputation as a composer, he is also a well known expert in computer
technology, robotics and interactive electronic art. He holds a doctors degree
from Ghent State University on the basis
of his dissertation on the technology of virtual
instruments of his design and invention. He is the author of an extensive
real time algorithmic music composition programming language: <GMT> running
on the Wintel platform.
He was a full time research and composition professor at the Ghent University
Association, School of Arts, until his retirement in 2014, but he is still active
in the research group of systematic musicology at the Ghent University.
He is currently the honorary president of the Logos Foundation and guest-director
of the Logos Robot orchestra as well as Associate
Researcher at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music. (OrCIM).
Contact adress:
- dr.Godfried-Willem RAES
- p/a Logos Foundation
- Kongostraat 35
- B-9000 GENT
- Flanders (Belgium)
- tel.: [32]-9-223.80.89
- email: GodfriedWillem.Raes@logosfoundation.org
Last updated: 2022-05-16 by Godfried-Willem Raes