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, and through songs with names like “Prairie Fire,” “Overpass,” “Champlain,” “Kennebec,” “Volcano,” 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 during an interview with 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.”
“Cosgrove’s compositions… are lush and alluring, and veritably breathe with the pulses and rhythms of the environment, while subtly acknowledging and commenting upon the complex relationship between humanity and the earth we inhabit.” – Rogovoy Report
“Cosgrove is a mesmerizing piano player and his compositions in response to landscape make you look at the world more attentively.” – Red Line Roots
