Manos Tsangaris was born in Düsseldorf in 1956 and studied composition and new music theater with Mauricio Kagel and percussion with Christoph Caskel at the Cologne University of Music. Today, he is considered one of the most important international exponents of new music theater. Since the 1970s, Manos Tsangaris has repeatedly made the conditions of performance the central theme of his compositions in various artistic formats.
Works by Manos Tsangaris are regularly performed at renowned festivals such as the Donaueschingen Music Days, the Witten Days for New Chamber Music, the Belgrade International Theater Festival, the MusikBiennale Berlin, the Venice Biennale, the Ultima Festival in Oslo, SPOR Aarhus, Tonlagen Dresden, Rainy Days Luxembourg, ECLAT Stuttgart, the Warsaw Autumn, and at theaters and opera houses in Cologne, New York, Mannheim, Dresden, and Berlin. In addition, Manos Tsangaris has received numerous composition commissions from German radio stations and wrote, among other things, a large orchestral work for the 10th anniversary of the Cologne Philharmonic Hall. In 2016/17, Tsangaris composed the cycle LIVING SPACES, the first part of which, WAIT!, premiered in Oslo, the second, CITY PIECES, in Hong Kong, and the third, HOME, in Athens. In 2023, he was artist in residence at the Passion: SPIEL festival at the National Theater Weimar. In 2024, his station theater trilogy ARNOLD ELEVATORS premiered at Wien Modern in the Secession, the Musikverein, and the Konzerthaus.
In 1980, Manos Tsangaris was a scholarship holder at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. In 1991, he initiated the Praemoderne Congress in Cologne. At the invitation of the Soviet Composers' Union, Tsangaris was composer in residence in Moscow in 1991. In 1991, he received the Bernd Alois Zimmermann Scholarship from the City of Cologne and a working scholarship from the Bonn Art Fund, followed in 1993/94 by a scholarship from the Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart. In 1997, he was awarded the Art Prize of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, followed by a residency at Villa Serpentara, Olevano, in 1998. In 2009, Tsangaris was a guest of honor at Villa Massimo, Rome. For his station theater piece “Batsheba. Eat the History!”, which premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Festival in 2009, he received the Composition Prize of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg.
In 2014, the Saxon State Opera (Semperoper) and the Dresden University of Music organized a symposium lasting several days on Manos Tsangaris' artistic work, with participants including Jörn Peter Hiekel (conductor), Marcel Beyer, Regine Elzenheimer, Rainer Nonnenmann, Bernhard Günther, Patrick Hahn, Natalie von Zadow, Raoul Mörchen, and Martin Zenck. In 2015, Manos Tsangaris was a Short Time Fellow at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome.
From 2002 to 2007, Tsangaris was artistic advisor to the artistic director of Schauspiel Köln, and from 2004 to 2012 he was a lecturer in composition at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. In 2009, he was appointed professor of composition at the Dresden University of Music and was elected a full member of the Berlin Academy of Arts in the same year (from 2012 to 2022, he was director of the music section there). In 2009, Tsangaris was appointed “guest curator of sound” at the KOLUMBA Art Museum in Cologne. Since 2010, he has been a full member of the Saxon Academy of Arts. In 2011, Tsangaris founded the International Institute for Art Investigation (IIKE) and has devoted himself to research in the field of scenic anthropology. In the 2012/13 academic year, he was Artist in Residence at the Zurich University of the Arts (Master's program in Transdisciplinarity).
From 2016 to 2024, Manos Tsangaris is artistic director of the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater (together with Daniel Ott). In 2017, he was elected a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. In the winter semester of 2017/18, he was a visiting professor at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. In 2023, Tsangaris was elected a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Since May 25, 2024, Manos Tsangaris has been president of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
As a drummer, composer, and lyricist, Manos Tsangaris has been working closely with musician and producer Dieter Krauthausen for years on their pulse-based project Unlock The Stillness. Since the 1980s, he has been a member of the percussion ensemble Drums Off Chaos, founded by Jaki Liebezeit. He has performed in numerous improvisation ensembles and as a soloist, including with Hanna Schygulla, Markus, and Simon Stockhausen.
Since 1990, Tsangaris' installations and visual artworks have been exhibited by major galleries and museums in Germany and abroad. Solo exhibitions have been dedicated to him by the Cologne Diocesan Museum and the Kunsthalle Odense (DK), among others. Concert tours have taken him to many countries in Europe, North America, and Asia.
“The question of how the various areas of human perception can be meaningfully and significantly combined in a work of art is at the heart of Manos Tsangaris’ compositional work. The activity of composing thus refers not only to the act of putting things together (i.e., composing), but also to the preceding experimental exploration of the interfaces at which media connections become possible in the first place. The expansion of the traditional concept of composition corresponds to the diversity of possible results. Over the past 25 years, in addition to musical compositions, he has also created poems, prose, and installation and visual works. Although Tsangaris' works in the field of words and images certainly claim independence, their bundling and synthesis in a universally understood musical theater is the central moment of his artistic activity.” (Patrick Müller)
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