NOTE: THIS SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Ben Cosgrove is a traveling composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist from New England. He travels constantly all over the country, 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.
His “electric and exhilarating” live 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 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,” “Champlain,” “Little Rain,” “Nashua,” “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.”
He has returned in 2021 with The Trouble with Wilderness, a lush, textured, and expansive set of twelve new songs that consider the role of nature and wildness in the built environment. “I found I was spending a lot of time onstage talking about national parks and oceans and wilderness areas, and not enough about the places that people are more likely to encounter in their everyday lives,” explains Cosgrove, whose career has included artist residencies and collaborations with Acadia and Isle Royale National Parks, White Mountain National Forest, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Chulengo Expeditions, and the New England National Scenic Trail, as well as solo performances in 48 states.
He assigned himself the challenge of writing a set of songs that would allow him to correct this oversight, and quickly found the decision to be eerily well-timed: almost immediately after he began writing and recording demos, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic would force virtually everyone on the planet both to find a new appreciation for the world just outside their front door and to reconsider the impermeability of whatever boundary they might have imagined to exist between the natural world and the human one. It also put Cosgrove, a musician who has traveled constantly for over a decade, in the unusual and terrifying position of having to sit still. “It really made me kind of have to walk the walk, in terms of the ideas I was trying to illustrate with this new music. Instead of driving eight hours to someplace new each morning, I was going on these daylong rambles all over the outskirts of town pretty much every day for months. I was amazed by what strange, beautiful, and interesting things I noticed as I found myself looking more and more closely at all the same ordinary-seeming places that I passed again and again.”
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 in more than one interview, 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 some parts of the album recall the work of George Winston, Keith Jarrett, Nils Frahm, or Ludovico Einaudi, his extensive experiences working with folk, pop, and Americana/roots bands are reflected in some of The Trouble with Wilderness’s more impassioned and percussive moments.
“…I think the practice of formally or informally dividing the world up into a bunch of conventionally beautiful ‘natural’ parts and another bunch of utilitarian, unpretty, ‘unnatural’ ones is one of our society’s more misguided and lastingly harmful tendencies,” Cosgrove notes in the album’s liner notes. The songs on The Trouble with Wilderness, faithful to this concept, are characterized by their textural contrasts and striking juxtapositions: ethereal and asymmetrical clouds blooming above a churning and insistent piano pattern in lead single “The Machine in the Garden”; tapped and plucked noises from all over the inside of a piano snapping wildly over a graceful bassline in “Cairn”; or in the final track, the delirious, ecstatic arpeggios that slowly burst free of their constraints over the course of its ten minutes. The production by indie-folk maestro Dan Cardinal (Josh Ritter, Darlingside, Lula Wiles, Session Americana, The Ballroom Thieves) both emphasizes the physicality of the instruments involved and elevates the sounds to places that are uncannily gorgeous and sometimes almost surreal: on songs like “Oklahoma Wind Speed Measurement Club” and “Wilder,” the heavy woodenness and intricate mechanics of the piano provide a raw and visceral anchor to the disorienting layers of ambience that unfold above it. “It's meant to sound mechanical, organic and ethereal all at once,” Cosgrove recently told WBUR, “and I think a piano is just the perfect instrument for getting at those three moods.” The result is an uncommonly beautiful set of songs and a massive step forward in Cosgrove’s idiosyncratic and increasingly mature body of work. Like the vernacular landscapes he looked to in composing it, the music on The Trouble with Wilderness sits on the narrow balancing point between order and wildness and manages to lean simultaneously into both.
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