Performance

Celebrated for his “dramatic” and “assertive” playing (New York Times), Tristan has premiered dozens of new solo and chamber works at iconic New York venues including Carnegie Hall, The Apollo Theater, The Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center, Roulette, The Stone, The Kitchen, Spectrum, National Sawdust, Symphony Space, The Museum of the Moving Image, and The DiMenna Center for Classical Music.

National appearances include Pittsburgh Opera and Bowerbird (Pennsylvania), Avaloch Farm Music Institute (New Hampshire), and RedLine Contemporary Art (Colorado). International venues include Powerhouse and The Box (Brisbane, Australia) and Soundscape Festival in Maccagno (Italy).

Teaching

Tristan has over 20 years of teaching experience and currently runs a thriving online piano studio for students of all ages and experience levels.

As a Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) Certified Teacher, his prize-winning students have received State Awards and Regional Gold Medals from RCM as well as outstanding marks from local competitions and festivals.

Tristan is also on faculty at the State University of New York at New Paltz where he has taught courses in music theory, piano performance, music history, and music criticism.

He has conducted workshops, performances, and lectures as a guest artist at notable institutions such as Columbia University, New York University, The University of Chicago, The University of Colorado at Boulder, Denver School of the Arts, Denison University, Berea College, Nova University (Lisbon, Portugal), and Queensland Conservatorium (Brisbane, Australia).

Tristan currently serves as the Historian for the Michigan Music Teachers Association and is a newly appointed board member for the Metropolitan Detroit Musicians League, a local chapter of the Music Teachers National Association.

Writing

Equally dedicated to writing about the music of our time, Tristan published a monograph on contemporary music notations entitled A Semiotic Approach to Open Notations: Ambiguity as Opportunity (Cambridge University Press).

He has contributed articles on aesthetics and performance to peer-reviewed journals such as The American Journal of Semiotics, NOTES: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, and Semiotics 2018: Resilience in an Age of Relation.

As a contributing writer for the Seattle Symphony for the past two seasons, he has written program notes and feature articles for internationally acclaimed pianists including Sir Stephen Hough, Emanuel Ax, Bruce Liu, Joe Hisaishi, and Yulianna Avdeeva.

He is also a contributing writer at I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, an award-winning hub for living music creators.

Education

Tristan is a graduate of New York University (PhD, BM) and Manhattan School of Music (MM), where he studied with Marilyn Nonken, Anthony de Mare, and Christopher Oldfather.