Ben Cosgrove will perform a program of original music
Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art
Saturday, March 25 at 6:30 PM
Ben Cosgrove is a traveling composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist based in northern New England. He performs regularly all over the country, presenting a unique variety of original instrumental music that explores themes of landscape, geography, and environment while straddling a line between the folk and classical genres. “Geography is Cosgrove’s muse,” writes the Boston Globe. “Like a sonic plein-air painter, [he] uses his piano as a paintbrush — and he’s made a name for himself doing it.” Ben’s “electric and exhilarating” solo piano performances are at once dazzling and intimate: music that has been described as “stunning” and “compelling and powerful,” — 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 environment, place, and geography. For years, he has been fascinated and inspired by the different ways people understand and interact with the landscapes around them.
Cosgrove’s new album Bearings, released in 2023, represents the latest chapter in a career that to date has included solo performances in 49 states (all but Delaware), as well as artist residencies and collaborations with institutions like Acadia, Isle Royale, Glacier, and Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Parks; White Mountain National Forest; the Schmidt Ocean Institute; the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology; Chulengo Expeditions; the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife & Fish Refuge; the New England National Scenic Trail; and NASA. To write the new record, Cosgrove relied on a novel and improvisation-focused compositional style that aimed to reflect the real experience of learning topographical space through movement. “I’ve always been a bit obsessed with motion,” writes Cosgrove in the liner notes, “and I liked the idea of forcing myself to write a whole record on the move, leaving no opportunity to overthink the songs before they had a chance to breathe. And conceptually, there was something about having to find a song in the moment by moving around the piano — feeling out its contours like you might learn those of a landscape by walking across it — that felt important and true to the way I engage with the world in the rest of my life.” While this approach unifies the album, the landscapes and ideas that inspire its songs range from Hawaiian volcanoes to Kansas skies, and from Midwestern rail yards to the writings of landscape scholar J.B. Jackson.
The new songs illuminate Cosgrove’s unique position as a musician 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 addition to his solo instrumental work, Cosgrove regularly tours, records, and collaborates with artists from across the worlds of folk, rock, and Americana music, and while much of his music recalls the work of George Winston, Keith Jarrett, Nils Frahm, or Ludovico Einaudi, his years of experience operating in the worlds of folk, pop, and Americana/roots music are reflected in some of his songs’ more impassioned and percussive moments.