Biography
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Born
1956 (age 68)
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Born In
Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Manos Tsangaris was born in Düsseldorf in 1956 and studied composition and New Music Theatre with Mauricio Kagel and percussion with Christoph Caskel at the Musikhochschule (Academy of Music) in Cologne. Since the 1970s, Manos Tsangaris has consistently made the conditions of a performance the central focus for compositions in various artistic formats. In 1991, Tsangaris was Composer in Residence in Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet Union of Composers. In the same year, he initiated the “Praemoderne” congress in Cologne. In 1991 he received the Bernd Alois Zimmermann Grant from the City of Cologne, and in 1993/94 a grant from the “Akademie Schloss Solitude”, Stuttgart. In 1997 he was presented with the Art Award of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1998 he stayed at the Villa Serpentara, Olevano, and in 2009 he was guest of honour at the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 1991 he lectured at the summer academy Civitella d'Agliano (Italy), in 2002 he taught transdisciplinary composition at NY Musikk in Oslo and Stavanger (Norway) and in 2003 at the KlangKunstBühne summer academy of the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2007/08 he was in charge of the academy project of the European Center of the Arts in Dresden at the Hellerau Festival Centre with 20 recipients of grants. Manos Tsangaris's compositions are regularly performed at internationally renowned festivals such as the Donaueschingen Festival, Witten Festival for New Chamber Music, the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, the Ultima Festival in Oslo, the “TonLagen” festival in Dresden, the Warsaw Autumn Festival and in theatres and opera houses in Cologne, New York, Mannheim, Dresden and Berlin. Manos Tsangaris has also often been commissioned by German radio broadcasters to write compositions. Among other things, he composed a large-scale orchestral work for the 10th anniversary of the Cologne Philharmonie concert hall. For his multi-site theatre piece “Batsheba. Eat the History!”, first performed in 2009 at the Donaueschingen Festival, Manos Tsangaris received the composition prize awarded by the SWR Symphony Orchestra. Since 1990, his installations and other art works have been regularly exhibited by important galleries and museums in Germany and abroad. The Cologne Diözesanmuseum and the Odense Art Gallery (Denmark), among other venues, have devoted solo exhibitions to his work. Concert tours have taken him to many countries in Europe, to North America and to Asia. From 2002 to 2007, Manos Tsangaris was artistic advisor to the director of the Cologne Schauspielhaus. Since 2004, he has taught at the International Holiday Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, and since 2008 he has been the guest curator for sound in Kolumba, the art gallery of the archdiocese of Cologne. In 2009, he was appointed as professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik (University of Music) in Dresden. In the same year, he was elected as a full member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, where he has headed the music department since 2012. In 2010 Manos Tsangaris was elected as a full member of the Sächsische Akademie der Künste (Saxon Academy of Arts), and in 2011 as the deputy secretary in the music category there. In 2011, he founded the “International Institute for Artistic Investigation” and undertook research in the area of scenic anthropology. In the study year 2012/13 Tsangaris is Artist in Residence at the Zurich University of the Arts (Master's course Transdisciplinarity). Since October 2012, he has been artistic director designate of the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre from 2016 (together with Daniel Ott). “Manos Tsangaris's compositional work focuses on the question of how the various media-related areas of human perception can be meaningfully combined. In the process, the activity of composing does not just refer to placing things together (com-posing), but at the same time to the preceding experimental exploration of the interfaces where media connections are made possible in the first place. This expansion of the traditional concept of composition is matched by the variety of the possible results. In the past 25 years, in addition to musical compositions, Tsangaris has created poems, prose, installations and other art works. Although his works in the field of language and pictures can very much be seen as independent in their own right, their combination and synthesis in a form of universally understood music theatre is the central element of his artistic activity." (Raoul Mörchen)
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