Born in 1954. Paul Koek studied percussion at the Königliches Konservatorium in Den Haag under Frans van der Kraan. His primary interest is in modern and contemporary music.
He was closely involved in the founding and development of Hoketus, the ensemble for modern music that is inextricably linked with the name of the composer Louis Andriessen. In the course of his professional career, he was worked with many celebrated artists, including Peter Greenaway, Heiner Goebbels, Bob Wilson, Fred Frith, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He was a member of LOOS and various other Dutch ensembles for many years. He founded the band Track and was a teacher for twelve years at the Königliches Konservatorium in Den Haag.
In 1987 Paul Koek began to work with the theater group Hollandia (founded by Johan Simons in 1985) as a musician and producer, becoming its artistic codirector in 1993. Koek has worked on the advancement of contemporary music theater, which he understands as a non-anecdotal type of theater, in which image, light, text, music, and projections are equally important elements with their own peculiar meanings and messages and hence are never mere illustration. He applies techniques of musical composition to all other elements of theater as well. Sounds are not only produced but, with the help of computers and sampling technologies, augmented, delayed, accelerated, repeated, and stopped. The theatrical real-time rendering of these sounds by the actors and musicians during performance makes up an important part of the special quality of his work. An important partner in this area is Dick Raaijmakers, with whom Koek realized three legendary productions for Hollandia: Der Fall/Dépons (1993), The Fall of Mussolini (1995), and Hermans’ Hand (1996).
Ten years later, Paul Koek took over the Veenstudio (an initiative of Hollandia), with the goal of continuing to promote and explore the development of music theater in an artistic home of his own. In that capacity, he produced Quick Lime with Florentijn Boddendijk and Remco de Jong in 1999, directing it together with Johan Simons. In conjunction with Frances-Marie Uitti and Ton van der Meer, he composed and realized the music for The Fall of the Gods (1999) and, with Ton van der Meer, the music for Judith (2000). The Veenstudio also realized a large number of equally important, smaller productions, including TasliT, Machine Agricole, and Wolfsjong. In January 2001, the Theatergroep Hollandia and Het Zuidelijk Toneel combined to form ZT Hollandia. Paul Koek and Johan Simons are the artistic codirectors of this new institution. They plan to continue to initiate their own music theater productions as well as those of others, who benefit from the company’s musical know-how and the high quality of its musical work. The fruits of this policy include Bacchae, a piece by the Syrian composer Nouri Iskandar and his ensemble. During the 2002/2003 season, Paul Koek produced two music theater works by two young European composers there; Yannis Kyriakides laid the foundation for Spinoza, and Caliope Tsoupaki composed the music for Dark.
At the same time, Paul Koek took Verdi’s arias as the starting point for the musical conception of Sentimenti (Ruhrtriennale, June 2003). In 2004 he realized Inanna, a new music theater piece in which the composer Louis Andriessen, the electronics specialist Johan van Kreij, the musician Ton van der Meer, and the filmmaker Hal Hartley worked together within an open structure. Since the disbanding of ZT Hollandia, Paul Koek has gone one to found a new ensemble. De Veenfabriek is an ensemble in which artists and scientists work together to place their developments and ideas in relation to one another, to society, and to research and the classic working forms. It is thus much more than a traditional music theater ensemble, which realizes and performs theatrical works. While it does not neglect this important task, it also devotes its energies to the ongoing exploration of new art forms, in which various artistic disciplines confront one another.
In 2005, escamotage by Yannis Kyriakides at Forum Neues Musiktheater.