Tristan Kasten-Krause, double bass

Tristan is a bassist and composer living in New York City whose work enlarges the minutiae of close tones and subtle gestures. As a bassist, he has been credited with providing his “low-end authority to vital New York institutions” (the New Yorker) like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and The Whitney Biennial, as well as LA’s Disney Hall and Hamburg’s state of the art Elbphilharmonie. He has been featured on Broadway in Gypsy (2025), Justin Peck’s Illinoise (2024) and Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (2019-2020), and on television in Netflix’s The Witcher, PBS’s Frontline and Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle. 

As a composer Tristan has been praised for his “heavenly” (the Guardian) original compositions, showcased at Issue Project Room, The Stone, The Hudson Basilica and the Grey Sound series at the University of Chicago. Most recently he has been the recipient of the 2024 Copland Fund and is a 2025 NYSCA grantee. In 2026, he and composer Sarah Hennies will premiere a new collaborative electroacoustic work at the Groupe de Reserche Musicale (GRM) in Paris and serve as composers in residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Their most recent album, The Quiet Sun, is out May 2nd on Dinzu Artefacts.