Manos Tsangaris

Born in Düsseldorf, Tsangaris studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln from 1976 to 1983 Composition and New Music Theatre with Mauricio Kagel and percussion with Christoph Caskel, next to that at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Alfonso Hüppi. Since 1980, he has participated several times in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse for Neue Musik and worked for the Münchner Kammerspiele. In 1991, he was invited by the Soviet composers' association as artist-in-residence in Moscow, in the same year he received the Bernd Alois Zimmermann scholarship from the city of Cologne, in 1992/93, the scholarship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and in 1997 the art prize of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, of which he has been a member since 2009. In the same year, he received the Orchestra Prize of the Donaueschinger Musiktage for his piece Batsheba. Eat the History.[1][2] Since 2012, he is head of the AdK section music.[3] In 2017, he was elected full member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste in the music section.[4]

Since the 1970s, Tsangaris has published poems, performed as a soloist and with various music groups (including Ritim Grup and MIR) and exhibited drawings, theatre apparatus and sound installations. He participated in festivals such as Cologne-New York in New York (1989), Ars Electronica in Linz (1991), Linz; "Sound Ways" in St. Petersburg (1995), "Yokohama Arts" (1997) and the "Musica-Festival Strasbourg" (1998, together with Hanna Schygulla, Markus and Simon Stockhausen).

Tsangaris has composed works commissioned by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the Südwestrundfunk, the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Kölner Philharmonie, the Diözesanmuseum Köln, the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Katholisches Bildungswerk Köln and the city of Witten. He is also active as a percussionist; he plays with Jaki Liebezeit and other percussionists in the improvisation ensemble Drums Off Chaos.

In 2009, he was appointed professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Dresden. In 2009 he was newly elected member of the Academy of Arts, since 2012 director of the music section there. In 2015 he was a practical scholarship holder at the Villa Massimo in Rome.[5] In 2016, Tsangaris took over the artistic direction of the Munich Biennale together with the Swiss composer Daniel Ott (as successor to Peter Ruzicka).[6][7]

• Stille Post. Gedichte. Thürmchen Verlag Köln 1986
• 3x8 Zeichnungen und 14 Gedichte (with Rainer Barzen). Thürmchen Verlag Cologne 1990
• Mundmaßung. Gedichte. Edition Solitude 1995
• Die kleine Trance. Gedichte. Radius Verlag 2002
• Werkbuch Manos Tsangaris. Werkbuch zum Implodierenden Schreibtisch. KOLUMBA Werkhefte und Bücher 2011/2014
• Unbekannte Empfänger. Gedichte. Radius Verlag 2017

• Jörn Peter Hiekel: Permanent Quest: The Processional Theatre of Manos Tsangaris. In Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner (ed.): Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes. Intellect Verlag, Bristol 2012, ISBN 978-1-84150-456-8
• Ulrich Tadday (ed.): Musik-Konzepte Sonderband Manos Tsangaris. edition text+kritik, München 2015, ISBN 978-3-86916-423-6

• Literature by and about Manos Tsangaris in the German National Library catalogue
• Manos Tsangaris discography at Discogs
• Homepage