Manfred Stahnke (born 30 October 1951) is a German composer and musicologist from Hamburg. He writes chamber music, orchestral music and stage music. His music makes extensive use of microtonality. He plays piano and viola.[1]
Life
Manfred Stahnke was born 1951 in Kiel. At the age of 15 he started to study violin, piano, composition in Lübeck.
Stahnke studied composition with Wolfgang Fortner (1970–1973), with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough (1973–1974), and with György Ligeti (1974–1979). In addition, he studied piano; his primary piano teacher was Edith Picht-Axenfeld.[2]
He also holds a doctoral degree in musicology, with a thesis on the subject of Pierre Boulez's Third Piano Sonata (1979, under Constantin Floros in Hamburg).
In 1979–80 he went to the United States to study with the microtonalist Ben Johnston in Urbana, Illinois, and with the computer music researcher and composer John Chowning at Stanford University, California.
Since 1989 he is professor of composition and music theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. He is an emeritus since April 2019.
Since 1999 he is a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg, where he was the director of the Section of Music until 2023.[3] He also was a member of the board of trustees of the Goethe Institute Munich for many years.
He plays the viola in the TonArt Ensemble.[4]
