Manos Tsangaris

Manos Tsangaris is born in 1956. Composer, drummer and installation artist, one of the most important representatives of experimental music theater. His compositions are internationally acclaimed and have been performed at several renowned festivals and theaters.

In 2009 he was appointed professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, and, in the same year, elected as a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin (director of the music department in 2011). He has been a member of the Sächsische Akademie der Künste since 2010. Tsangaris has been artist-in-residence at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) for the 2012-13 academic year; he has, since October 2012, been artistic director designate (from 2016) for the Munich Biennale for Music Theatre (together with Daniel Ott). He founded the Internationale Institut für Kunstermittlung.

He has done research in the field of scenic anthropology. Since the 1970s, he has repeatedly taken performance conditions to be an essential theme of his compositional work, expressed in different artistic formats. Patrick Müller, Professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, has written about Tsangaris: “Manos Tsangaris has always worked to expand and refine the use of media in his composition and craft. His main focus is on how various human areas of perception are linked to one another in art works and how they can be developed so as to converge. Tsangaris has written pieces for conventional concert ensembles, but also writes literary texts and creates art works and installations. However, when these different media come together within one context, he is not concerned merely with arranging them as skillfully as possible; rather, the composer is principally interested in examining the intersections where such media combinations are possible in the first place. The originality of his approach makes him one of the most significant proponents of a new form of music theater, an innovative artistic format combining sound, speech and setting.”