Saturday, Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m.—BRANDON—Ben Cosgrove is a traveling composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist from New England. He performs regularly all over the country, writes scores for films, plays, radio, and TV, and has produced several well-received albums of original instrumental work that straddles the line between folk and classical music. Hear him perform live at Brandon Music Saturday, Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m.
The strongest forces guiding Cosgrove’s composition and performances are his deep interests in landscape, place, and ecology. For years, he has been fascinated and inspired by the different ways people interact with their built and natural environments, and through songs with names like “Prairie Fire,” “Little Rain,” “Nashua,” “Sigurd F. Olson,” 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 noted in an interview in Harvard Magazine, “but more just as responding to places musically.”
In 2014, Cosgrove released “Field Studies,” his first full-length studio offering since 2011’s “Yankee Division,” which focused specifically on the environment of north-central New England. The music on “Field Studies” looks through a broader lens, considering the human experience of many dramatically varied physical landscapes across North America. Taken as a whole, the record and the performances Cosgrove has given in the wake of its release offer an intimate aural tour of the continent and a unique expression of place. At the end of 2014, Sound of Boston named “Field Studies” one of the best local albums released that year. The following year, he released “Solo Piano,” a collection of live performances recorded in an unusual array of performance spaces—clubs, forests, a theater, a ferry, a living room, a bar, a national park, and more—all around the country.
Tickets are $20. Contact 802-247-4295 or info@brandon-music.net for reservations. Brandon Music is located at 62 Country Club Rd., Brandon. BYOB.
Photo courtesy of Brandon Music
BEN COSGROVE
