Music Is A Frame
8 Dec 2026, 7 pm

As a student, the composer and drummer Manos Tsangaris decided to take up a new form of activism: he began composing installations. His stages are forests, cafés, underground stations, care homes and opera houses. A film about the power of attention, for when we listen closely, the world changes before our very eyes.

Inspired by his encounter with Mauricio Kagel, his professor of composition, Tsangaris breaks down the boundaries of musical theatre, placing sight and sound in a fluid and reflective relationship, and creates immersive experiences in which the audience, in small groups or alone, finds itself confronted with short musical-theatrical scenes.

“Alongside a few early photographic records, the film focuses primarily on Tsangaris’s works from 2016 to 2023. It shows the composer with students and ensembles in Dresden, Hong Kong, Oslo, Munich and Athens as he explains, rehearses and performs his pieces. Through cinematic cuts and cross-fades, Barbara Lubich adapts precisely those compositional principles that Tsangaris realises in his music theatre. […] The film overlays Tsangaris’s music and explanations with views of housing blocks, skyscrapers, bus and ferry journeys. Like his musical theatre miniatures, the film illustrates a phenomenon that is simple in general yet complex in detail: one hears differently when one sees something to go with it, and one sees differently when one hears something to go with it. The film interweaves indoors and outdoors, theatre and everyday life, music and the urban backdrop.” (Rainer Nonnenmann)

The event pays tribute to the work of Manos Tsangaris, president of the Akademie der Künste, to mark his 70th birthday.