About

Tristan Kasten-Krause 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 globally at LA’s Disney Hall, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Paris’s Maison de la Radio et de la Musique, Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome and the Ruhrtriennale.

He has performed with many of the world’s top contemporary ensembles including The Bang on a Can All-Stars, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, Contemporaneous, and Ensemble Signal.

Over the last decade Tristan has worked with forward-thinking artists such as Sigur Ros, Alvin Lucier, Julia Wolfe, Sarah Davachi, Caroline Shaw, David Lang, Ichico Aoba and Steve Reich. He has appeared on Broadway in Gypsy with Audra McDonald (2025), Justin Peck’s Illinoise (2024) and Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (2019-2020), and can be heard 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 music. His work has been showcased at Ina GRM, Issue Project Room, The Stone, The Hudson Basilica, Cleveland Uncommon Sounds Project, Black Mountain College Museum and the University of Chicago’s Grey Sound series. He has most reciently received support from the Copland Fund (2024), the New York State Council on the Arts (2025) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2026).

Tristan is the bassist for the mictrotonal metal band Scarcity and holds a masters in music from The Hartt School where he studied with Robert Black.