MUSICIAN, WRITER, & LANDSCAPE ENTHUSIAST

Ben Cosgrove is a traveling composer-performer whose music explores themes of landscape, place, and environment. Described by the Boston Globe as “a sonic plein-air painter who uses his piano as a paintbrush,” Ben has performed in every U.S. state except for Delaware, collaborated with groups ranging from rock bands to research scientists, contributed music to several radio and film projects including the Ken Burns documentary The American Buffalo, and held residencies and fellowships with institutions including NASA, the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, Harvard University, Middlebury College, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the Connecticut River Museum, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. He performs regularly with a wide array of other musicians, and has published nonfiction about landscape and place in the pages of Orion, Taproot, Northern Woodlands, Appalachia, Wildsam, and other outlets.

Ben’s music has been called "beautiful and fascinating" (The Maine Edge), "deeply impressive" (Independent Clauses), and "immediately evocative and fully arresting... brim[ming] with technical mastery and emotional capital" (Seven Days). Sound of Boston described him as "a master of painting sonic portraits of curious, unexpected places." “His music is quintessentially American, omnivorous, and democratic,” writes Yankee Magazine. “It incorporates elements of classical, folk, country, blues, pop, et cetera, and can be by turns meditative and chaotic, somber and exuberant, lovely and frightening, still and dynamic. There are times it feels like his pieces are blowing in off the water, or rising from the earth in a swell, a surge, spinning eddies off the edges. There are times when they feel like they’re coming from the sky. […] There is nothing else like it.”

Please read more about Ben and his work here.