Manos Tsangaris receives Mauricio Kagel Music Prize

The composer and installation artist Manos Tsangaris has been awarded the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize, endowed with 80,000 euros. The 67-year-old was once a student of the Argentinian-German composer Kagel (1931-2008) and is a professor at the Dresden University of Music. The Music Prize of the Cultural Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia will be awarded on May 7 at the Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne, the Dresden University of Music announced on Friday.

"Composition has long since ceased to take place only in music. It is important to me to create an awareness of the fact that all media formats that we consume every day via the internet, social media, news broadcasts, commercials, etc. are composed for a specific purpose," explained Tsangaris. This means that composers have a not inconsiderable influence on how content is transported and perceived.

The prize money includes a grant of 50,000 euros for the performance of a newly created work with an ensemble from NRW. The Kunststiftung NRW has been awarding the prize since 2011. The reasons for the current award included the following: "Manos Tsangaris is an artistic multiverse. If you try to pin him down to one particular genre, he immediately comes up with another: as a composer or poet, as a theater maker, communication researcher, media, light or landscape artist - and sometimes all of these at the same time."