PERFORMANCE: Sarah Hennies + Tristan Kasten Krause
Thursday, August 7th, 2025 at 7pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
TICKETS – $12 General Admission / $8 for BMCM+AC members + Students w/ID
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https://www.tickettailor.com/events/blackmountaincollegemuseumartscenter/1698686
Join us for a duo performance by Sarah Hennies and Tristan Kasten-Krause, August 7th, 2025 at BMCM+AC.
Composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies and composer and bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause make music rooted in observation. Timbres across percussion and string instruments gradually meld into one; pitches gently float into consonance after bristling in dissonance. The Quiet Sun (2025), their debut duo album recorded at ISSUE Project Room, presents two works that each show a different lens into the large-scale forms they have developed together.
Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has worked with a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, ensemble 0, Judith Hamann, R. Andrew Lee, The Living Earth Show, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund. As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
Tristan Kasten-Krause is a bassist and composer living in Brooklyn, New York who’s work enlarges the minutiae of close tones and subtle gestures. As a bassist he has been credited with lending his “low-end authority to vital New York institutions” (the New Yorker) and praised for his “heavenly” (the Guardian) original compositions. His work exploring duration and expanded time has led to multiple sets on the Hudson Basilica’s 24-Hour Drone festival, performances of extended, endurance-based works with extreme metal band Scarcity, and the premiere of a marathon 6-hour opera (2023’s Stranger Love) for the LA Phil. Over the last decade Tristan has worked with adventurous and experimental artists such as Alvin Lucier, LEYA, Denardo Coleman, David First, Man Forever and Henry Threadgill. He has served as bassist in contemporary chamber ensembles including Argento New Music, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, Ensemble Signal and Contemporaneous. Tristan’s debut album of original compositions, 2021’s Potential Landscapes, features performances by soloists Lisel, Matt Evans and members of the Glenn Branca Ensemble and Cloud Nothings that have been elongated, warped and extended to create “beautiful, unearthly soundscapes” (WNYC). His most recent album of collaborative compositions, Images of One with violist Jessica Pavone, was released February 17th on Relative Pitch Records.
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