The Gray Center is pleased to welcome Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause Friday, May 3rd, 8pm (doors at 7:30pm) for its final installment of our fifth season of Gray Sound, curated by Andrew Stock. 

A note from the curator of Gray Sound 5 
I first got to know Sarah Hennies’s work in a non-institutional context around 2011 or ‘12. These were the last days, I could say, of a sprawling midwestern DIY scene within which her work was already well known. At that time, Hennies’s career was in the process of shifting focus from the understated and idiosyncratic body of (mostly) percussion music with which she established herself as a composer/performer throughout the first decade of the 2000s to an increasing output of commissioned work for other performers. As its playership and scale has expanded, the work has also seen increased institutional recognition: a short list of highlights from within the past year alone includes the large ensemble piece Motor Tapes at the Whitney Biennial, a United States Artists fellowship, and portrait concerts at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre and the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music. Even as the Euro-/American contemporary music establishment has become more interested in this music, the work itself has retained a compellingly resistant quality — in its insistence on the loop, the cut, and the non-sequitur, it remains detached from scholastic exposition and timeworn rhetorical expression. Recently, Hennies and bassist/composer Tristan Kasten-Krause have used a vibraphone/bass duo — augmented by an array of other percussion instruments, objects, and electronics — as a basic canvas on which to explore collaborative approaches to long-form performance. At the end of a 2023–24 concert season filled with extraordinary artists, I’m delighted to be able to close Gray Sound 5 with new beginnings by inviting Chicago audiences to follow the Hennies/Kasten-Krause duo in the next phase of this unique project

— Andrew Stock

About the Artists
Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & 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), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.

Tristan Kasten-Krause is a bassist and composer living in Brooklyn, New York whose 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 cathartic, hour-long compositions with experimental black metal band Scarcity, and the premiere of the marathon 6-hour opera, Stranger Love, for the LA Phil. Over the last decade, Tristan has worked with forward-thinking artists such as Sigur Ros, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Hennies, Caroline Shaw, LEYA, Man Forever, and Steve Reich. He has served as bassist in modern ensembles including Argento New Music, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, Ensemble Signal, and Contemporaneous.

About Gray Sound
Founded in 2019 by Gray Center Director and UChicago Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities, Seth Brodsky, Gray Sound was envisioned as an ongoing performance and discussion series that represents a chance for artists and the broader community to tease the boundaries of sound—when it moves from voice to music, recognizable tune to noise, experience to idea, and back.