BEN COSGROVE
 
Ben Cosgrove is a composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist based in New England. He performs regularly all over the country, writes scores for films, plays, radio, and television, and has produced several well-received albums of original instrumental music. His “electric and exhilarating” live performances on solo piano are at once dazzling and intimate, the music both delicate and commanding. From 2012 to 2014 Ben served as the Signet Artist-in-Residence Fellow at Harvard University, and he is a recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award. He has also held residencies and fellowships at Acadia National Park, Isle Royale National Park, Middlebury College, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and he is currently the artist in residence at White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and Maine.
 
In recent years, Ben’s interests in landscape, place, and ecology have become the strongest forces guiding his composition and performances. “I don’t think of my pieces as rendering places in music,” he notes in an article in Harvard Magazine, “but more just as responding to places musically. Writing music just turns out to be a great way for me to process the world.” For years, Ben has been inspired by the ways people respond to built and natural environments, and through songs with names like “Prairie Fire,” “I am Walking Inland,” “Nashua,” and others, he seeks to recreate these phenomena with sound. A year spent researching the preservation of natural soundscapes in America’s national parks has also shaped much of his new material. “I’m interested in the relationship between sound and a sense of place,” he says. “So much of the North American soundscape is becoming clouded with drones and mechanized noise that it’s quickly losing the rich diversity you see in the continent’s visual landscape.”
 
STEPHANIE JENKINS
 
Stephanie Jenkins is a banjo player and documentary filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn. She likes making old things seem new…
 
They’ll serenade you with original songs, written for banjo and piano.
 
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