Kolten Heeren

Runner-up in the 2026 John Eaton Memorial Competition
Member since 2026

KOLTEN HEEREN is an American composer whose work centers around diverse soundscapes and organic storytelling. His music blends modal polyphony with aleatoric soundmass, always with an emerging undercurrent of vocal lyricism evoking echoes of memory, nostalgia, and wistful dreaming.

His music has been performed throughout the United States and Europe. He has been a finalist for both the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Award and BMI Students Composers Award, and has won calls for scores from the TEMPO Ensemble, Orkest, and CMCB. Additionally, he has served as a composition fellow in June in Buffalo; at Etchings Music Festival; at Soundbox Ventures; at Texas New Music Festival; and at Arts, Letters, and Numbers.

Kolten received his BM from the University of Illinois, where he studied with Reynold Tharp, Stephen Taylor, Zack Browning, Heinrich Taube, and Erin Gee. He continued on to his MM at Indiana University, where he studied with Eugene O’Brien, Aaron Travers, and P.Q. Phan.

Also an accomplished Double Bassist, Kolten performs with orchestras and opera companies around the United States. He is a section member of the Sarasota Opera and has performed with the Sarasota Orchestra, Indianapolis Opera, and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. Also a soloist, he most recently recorded his own composition Elegy for the Rasping Masses for unaccompanied double bass. He also founded the Double Bass Repertory Project, which commissions and performs new chamber works for the Double Bass. Kolten earned a Performance Diploma in Orchestral Studies from Indiana University, where he studied with Kurt Muroki.