‘Every time I play a show, I have to explain what it’s about’
‘Landscape enthusiast’ Ben Cosgrove has composed music for the likes of NASA and Acadia National Park
Idiscovered Ben Cosgrove’s music at exactly the right time: stuck in traffic. Like Brian Eno’s “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” the Methuen native’s piano-driven compositions all but prompt you to take three deep breaths.
The bulk of his catalog is instrumental music made to peace out to, and if tracks like “Kennebec” and “Champlain” (off 2017’s “Salt”) feel like taking a calming walk by a Maine river or Vermont lake, well, that’s what they’re meant to sonically replicate.
Geography is Cosgrove’s muse. Like a sonic plein air painter, the 2010 Harvard grad uses his piano as a paintbrush — and he’s made a name for himself doing it.
Cosgrove, 35, has been tapped by NASA, Acadia National Park, Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, White Mountain National Forest, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, New England National Scenic Trail, and others to compose geographic and environmental-inspired pieces.
Most recently, Ken Burns’s Florentine Films asked Cosgrove for music to evoke the American plains for
“The American Buffalo,” debuting on PBS Oct. 16.
His new album, “Bearings,” dropped on Oct. 6, and Cosgrove celebrates with a release show in Boston Oct. 12 at The Lilypad. A string of New England shows ends with a hometown Methuen show Nov. 3.
Since his debut 2011 album, “Yankee Division” — described on his site as “primarily inspired by the landscape of north-central New England” — Cosgrove has written songs based on Hawaii, Northern California, Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, the plains of Kansas, and countless other terrains.
He bills himself as a “landscape enthusiast” and a “traveling composer, pianist” — and that’s no poetic exaggeration. When I reached him, he was at a friend’s house in Portland, Maine. (“I’m a full-time wanderer.”)
Q. Did you concentrate in music at Harvard?
A. Yeah, I found it was a perfect place to study music because I didn’t have to hang out with musicians. All my friends were biologists and English majors. College was also where I learned I was deeply interested in built environment. I was a music concentrator, but a geography nerd on the sly.
Q. What drew you to music?
A. Writing music was a way I’d processed the world since I was a little kid. When I was 4, my parents found me a piano teacher in Andover, Judy Schmidt. She had this go-with-theflow, dynamic approach. I was 5 or 6, and she’d send me home saying, “Go write a song about snow.” So I learned early on to write instrumental music as a means of exploring concepts.
Q. And how did that grow into what you do now?
A. In college, I learned I had this weird obsession with place and landscape, how topography affects minds. [Landscape] is a perfect metaphor for whatever else you might want to talk about. For example, my way of writing a breakup album [“Salt”] was to write music about shifting landscapes where you can’t depend on the ground underneath you.
Q. I like that. So how would you write a song about Boston?
A. I don’t write often about places I know well, because I don’t have distance. I write about places that are confusing to me. For instance, the first time I drove across Kansas, I was completely overwhelmed and intimidated by how terrifyingly flat it was. You can’t tell where you are in relation to anything else. So I wrote “Abilene.” You wouldn’t describe it “as a portrait of Kansas” [laughs] but it’s inspired by it.
Q. You composed a song for NASA — “Volcano” is on your new album.
A. Yeah, NASA sends volcanologists from various institutions to study volcanoes and lava tubes, with an eye toward applying what they learn to future projects on the moon and Mars, which have weirdly similar surfaces.
So I had this wild week last summer at Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California. I’d go out with these volcano scientists, and try my best to follow as they walked me through the science. In return, I wrote “Volcano.”
It’s mostly inspired by lava tubes. When a volcano blows up, it doesn’t necessarily shoot lava everywhere. I thought it would be interesting to follow that energy, where it begins as a roiling, formless pool and then falls into certain channels. The piece moves through several stages of movement that are more blurry or violent or unpredictable than the ones before.
Q. This is interesting because your songs are all so calming and peaceful. A. [laughs] Every time I play a show, I have to explain what it’s about. It’s up to the audience whether they listen with that in mind, but I feel I owe it to everybody to say “Actually, this is about Nebraska.” [laughs]
But in a wild coincidence, a week after NASA, I got invited to be the artist-in-residence at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. It was perfect because I just had this intensive weeklong volcano indoctrination.
Q. You have so many of these residencies and commissions — how do they find you? Do they always reach out to you?
A. The last several, they found me. A bit is word of mouth. I must now just be Googleable as “a guy who will come with your team of scientists and write songs about it.”
My next one is the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife Refuge. That will take me through next spring.
Q. What sparked “Bearings”?
A. I’d been thinking about how I experience and understand landscapes in real life. I don’t feel I understand a place until I’ve approached it from 100 different directions. I tried to illustrate that, and landed on this scary idea of walking into a studio with a list of places and ideas but no music written.
I worked them up on-the-fly, moving around the piano to find the song the way you would orient yourself in a landscape, getting your bearings. It was scary as hell. [laughs]
Q. So except for the Charlie Parr cover you have here, “1922,” the rest are all improv?
A. Exactly. Well, I did [various takes] but they’re all written on the spot.
Then at Dimension Sound Studios in JP, we added overdubs, subtle stuff — field recordings, some weird percussion — to make them more three-dimensional.
Q. Do you have a favorite song on the album?
A. I like “The Museum of Everyday Life.” That’s inspired by a real museum in Glover, Vt. Essentially every year they put up a new exhibit of everyday objects you wouldn’t give a second thought. This year is wheels. One year was dust.
Q. What other new songs are inspired by New England?
A. “Depth of Field” is about watching mist move over a field in central Maine. The piano gesture moves very little, but it happens over and over again. So you wind up paying attention to the ambient clouds of woodwinds and synthesizers that scud across it.
Q. Do you remember the first time you were inspired by landscape? Did you think this way as a kid?
A. A lot of my most formative experiences — we spent summers in the Mount Monadnock area [in New Hampshire] — and I’d go off on my bike. I’d wander. I’d stitch together this mental map. I’ve always liked knowing where things are. But I never thought you could write music about it [laughs]. I’ve just figured out a way to monetize restlessness.
Find a list of upcoming New England shows at bencosgrove.com/ shows.