Manos Tsangaris

Manos Tsangaris was born in Duesseldorf (Germany) in 1956 and studied composition and New Music Theater with Mauricio Kagel and percussion with Christoph Caskel at the Cologne Academy of Music. His compositions are internationally acclaimed and performed at several renowned festivals such as the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, the international theatre festival of Belgrade, the Musik-Biennale Berlin, the Biennale Venezia and the Donaueschinger Musiktage. Furthermore, theatres and opera houses in Cologne, New York, Mannheim, Dresden and Bielefeld have produced his works.  

In 1991 Manos Tsangaris lectured at the summer academy Civitella d’Agliano (Italy), in 2002 he taught transdisciplinary composition at Ny Musikk in Oslo and Stavanger (Nor) and in 2003 at the KlangKunstBühne of the Berlin University of the Arts. He has been the advisor of the artistic director of the Cologne Theatre from 2002 to 2007 as well as a lecturer at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for Contemporary Music in 2004-10. 

In May 2009 the first part of his new "Stationentheater" Batsheba. Eat the History! for actors, singers and ensemble was premiered at the State Opera House Unter den Linden in Berlin. For the full cyclus, Tsangaris was awarded the composition prize of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg during the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2009. 
In October 2009, he was appointed professor at the Academy of Music Dresden and was appointed full member of the Academy of the Arts, Berlin.

In 2010, Manos Tsangaris was appointed full member of the Saxon Academy of the Arts.

“The question how different medial human modes of perception can be connected in a sensible and pregnant way in a work of art is central for the compositional work of Manos Tsangaris. Therefore, the act of composing is not only related to the effort of putting things together (com-posing), but at the same time is related to the preceding experimental exploration of the interface at which medial connections are possible in the first place. The expansion of the traditional definition of what "composition" means leads to a multiplicity of results. Besides musical compositions, Tsangaris has in the past 25 years also created poems, prose, installations and visual works. Although his literal and visual works claim autonomy, their coming together and synthesis in a universally understood music theatre is the central moment of his artistic work.“