Born in Kiel on 30 October 1951; Manfred Stahnke is a German composer, violist and music theorist. At the age of fifteen he began violin, piano and composition in Lübeck. He studied composition from 1970 to 1973 with Wolfgang Fortner, from 1973 to 1974 with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough and from 1974 to 1979 with György Ligeti; his principal piano teacher was Edith Picht-Axenfeld. In 1979 he took his doctorate with Constantin Floros in Hamburg on Pierre Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata. From 1979 to 1980 he stayed in the USA, where he studied microtonal composition with Ben Johnston in Urbana and computer music with John Chowning at Stanford University. From 1989 he taught as professor of composition and music theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, and has been emeritus since April 2019; since 1999 he has belonged to the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg and directed its music section until 2023. He writes chamber, orchestral and stage music, working largely microtonally; as a violist he plays in the TonArt Ensemble. In the Cybele catalogue he appears on Harmonies and Counterpoints between Germany and America (1999).
Manfred Stahnke
Composer
