About the Artist
Ben Cosgrove (www.bencosgrove.com) regularly travels across the United States performing a unique variety of original instrumental music that explores themes of landscape, geography, and environment while straddling a line between folk and classical music. Cosgrove’s unique position as a musician is suspended somewhere between genres: “I’m either a singer-songwriter who doesn’t sing, or I’m a composer who behaves like a singer-songwriter,” he has said, and his chatty, disarming stage presence would certainly make him seem more like a folk musician than a classical pianist. In his compositions he utilizes field recordings, innovative arrangements, and elegantly interwoven melodies to evoke deserts, wilderness lakes, prairies, mountain ranges, coastlines, and sprawling suburbs all in turn. In one piece, swirling arpeggios capture the disorientation of a fast drive across the plains; in another, murmuring dissonances suggest the swell of the tide. His “electric and exhilarating” live performances are at once dazzling and intimate: music that has been described as “stunning” and “compelling and beautiful,” — Red Line Roots has called him “stupidly talented” — all presented with “warmth, humor, honesty, and the easy familiarity of a troubadour.”
Throughout his career, the strongest forces guiding Ben’s composition and performances have been his deep and abiding interests in landscape, geography, place, and environment. For years, he has been fascinated and inspired by the different ways people understand and interact with the landscapes around them, and through songs with names like “Prairie Fire,” “The Machine in the Garden,” “Little Rain,” “Nashua,” “Champlain,” “Sigurd F. Olson,” “Kennebec,” and others, he seeks to explore those relationships and reflect them in sound. “I don’t think of my pieces as rendering places in music,” he once remarked in an interview in Harvard Magazine, “but more just as a way of responding to places musically. Writing music just turns out to be a great way for me to process the world.”
For more information, visit www.bencosgrove.com