Mauricio Kagel Music Prize Announces 2024 Winner

Composer and installation artist Manos Tsangaris  has won the award alongside a €80,000 cash prize

The composer, drummer and installation artist Manos Tsangaris has received the Music Prize of the Kunststiftung (Cultural Foundation) NRW, also known as the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize for 2024.

Awarded since 2011, the prize’s €80,000 endowment includes a grant of €50,000 for the performance of a newly created work with an ensemble from the German state, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). 

Tsangaris, 67, is currently a professor at the Dresden University of Music and once studied with the Argentinian-German composer Mauricio Kagel at the Cologne University of Music from 1976 to 1983. 

Widely regarded as an acclaimed international representative in new music theater, Tsangaris has been dedicating his efforts to exploring the intricacies of performance conditions as an essential subject of composition.

The award ceremony was held on May 7, 2024, at the Kolumba Art Museum in Cologne. The 2024 Artistic Advisory Board comprised Péter Eötvös, Louwrens Langevoort, Sarah Nemtsov, and Lydia Jeschke. 

“Composition has long since ceased to take place only in music,” Tsangaris explained, according to Die Sachsen News. “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.”

“In Manos Tsangaris’ detailed projects, the experiences and perceptions of the individual become the starting point for a heightened general, social awareness,” wrote the Artistic Advisory Board in the press release, “this is a current, necessary concept for ours present, which can also be considered Mauricio Kagel’s legacy.”

“Tsangaris is an artistic multiverse,” the board added. “If you pin him down to a certain genre, he immediately comes up with another: as a composer or a poet, as a theater maker, communication researcher, media, light or landscape artist — and sometimes everything. At the same time, however, a very unique world emerges in his works, into which he invites us, the listeners and viewers, and always says this world in a concentrated form, often with charming humor and sometimes almost as if by the way, a lot about who his art then releases us into.”