Biography
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Born
3 March 1929
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Born In
Rethymno, Kriti, Greece
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Died
24 July 2013 (aged 84)
Νίκος Μαμαγκάκης {Nikos Mamangakis} is a Greek composer.
Mamangakis was born in Rethimno, Crete. He attended lessons at the Greek Conservatory of Athens, and continued studying musical composition with Carl Orff and H. Gedamer in Munich, and electronic music at the SIEMENS Electronic Music Studio with Josef Anton Riedl. He received various scholarships from the Greek government, the Supreme Music Academy of Munich and the city of Berlin (Deutscher Akademischer Austauscudienst).
He began his career in the late 1980s, using early electronics in an original and personal way. His style was based in part on elements of traditional Greek culture, but with many personal traits in regards to structuring the sound. He has written chamber music, theatre, cinema, and television music, operas, electronic music, pieces for orchestra and solo instruments, and song cycles. In 1972 he wrote Κυκεώνας (Confusion), commissioned for the Munich Olympic Games. In those early years, his orchestral compositions reached their height with “Anarchy” concerts, a commission by the Donaushiegen Festival: a piece for five timpani and a large orchestra. In the mid 1980s he presented two new operas, Odyssey and Erotokritos.
He has written music for various Greek films such as The Lady and the Vagrant, The Fairy and the Young Man, almost all of Nikos Perrakis’ film scores, as well as song cycles such as The Centre of Passersby and Eleven Folk Songs. His involvement in television and film music was focused more in West Germany; he wrote the music for Thomas Mann’s film Felix Croyle and the worldwide famous hit series by Edgar Reitz, Heimat I, II, and III . This was a fifty-six-hour film, the longest film of all time, with over twenty hours of music. The premiere was held at the Munich Opera in 1992.
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