Ben Cosgrove is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist from Methuen, Massachusetts, whose work mainly explores the intersection of sound and place.
Background
Cosgrove is a 2010 graduate of Harvard College, where he was a student of Hans Tutschku, and his music usually features his own performances on piano, guitar, mandolin, banjo, violin, trumpet, trombone, upright bass, and dynamic percussion, among other instruments. Cosgrove's first instrument was the piano. He began taking lessons as a young child after his family moved into a house and his parents purchased an upright. In addition to his solo work, he often tours and records with other artists and has frequently served as the touring keyboardist/accordionist for fellow New EnglandersThe Ghost of Paul Revere.
Releases
His 2011 album Yankee Division is based upon landscapes around Massachusetts and the rest of New England and takes its name from the Yankee Division Highway. His fourth album Field Studies deals with the wider American landscape, from the Sierra Nevada to the Everglades. It was released in January 2014."It’s instrumental music intended to suggest the experience of certain physical landscapes," he stated in an interview with Sound of Boston. The album's first track, “Lafayette” is written about Mount Lafayette in New Hampshire; the song is meant to recreate the moment in the hike when “you get above the clouds and have a unique kind of clarity.” In 2014, he produced the album Ellery for singer-songwriter Max Garcia Conover, composing and performing arrangements to underpin Conover's melodies. In 2015, Cosgrove released a live album, "Solo Piano," which features recordings collected from performances in thirteen different states. One reviewer called it "a humbling reminder of just how much emotion can be conveyed without a word on a solo piano that is expertly played." His latest studio album, "Salt," a concept record comparing landscapes of flux and ambiguity to personal tumult and emotional unrest, came out in the spring of 2017 and was described by as "the human condition set to gorgeous, lush piano." In , reviewer James Napoli wrote that the music represented "a poetry of tones and turns and motion and play that transcends the gross signification of everyday language Cosgrove’s music is about landscape, about place, about space. It reacts and responds and reflects and resonates in space. It creates and transforms space. This album, specifically, is about instability, uncertainty, liminality, disorientation. It’s about the unhinged feeling that comes from losing the solid ground on which one has comfortably and complicitly stood for too long, about the realization that the safety provided by such footholds is always illusory, and about learning to live with the shifting, floating impermanence that was there, enveloping us all along. It’s a break-up album. And it’s also a salve."
