Cosgrove’s seventh album is shaped by wind, water, and wilderness, mapping the natural world to the piano.
Ben Cosgrove is not a bedroom musician: he’s a top-of-a-mountain, lost-in-a-forest, and tip-of-a-peninsula musician. More than that, he’s an American musician, in the sense that America — its peaks, valleys, rivers, and forests — is his music.
Such is the case with Cosgrove’s new album Topograph, released January 31, where the New England-based pianist ventured into a forest in Connecticut, spent time at the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife & Fish Refuge in Wisconsin, and lived at an artist residency at the tip of a Washington peninsula. The landscapes he observed – whether they were sand dunes being sculpted in real time by the wind, densely packed forests, or cliffs slowly falling into the sea – became his compositional source material for Topograph.
Combining the dynamic landscape with deft pianism, a direct line can be drawn between places and piano keys. “Sand Island” tells the sonic tale of the dunes he spent his Washington residency studying. The piece is windswept, with the upper reaches of a minimalistic melody crystalline like a single grain of sand observed closely, the dexterous inner voices of his other digits like swathes of shifting sands. “Quiet Corner” was composed from his time spent in the Yale-Myers forest in Northeastern Connecticut. A soft bed of chords is overlaid by a smothering canopy of arpeggiation. The melody, barely rising above a whisper, peeks through like the sunlight. With a welling line, cellist Harris Paseltiner adds a rich understory to the ecosystem.
Cosgrove’s music can take on a scientific precision: an icy vignette like “Wind Erosion,” with its academic title, has a piercing accuracy. The wispy and sustained left hand fills out a piece that lives entirely in the upper octaves. Through his zooming in on the complex processes of nature, Cosgrove simultaneously zooms out, capturing its immensity in sound. “[My songs] are like little nature essays in wordless form,” Cosgrove said to me in an interview in 2021.
Cosgrove’s music does a lot to defamiliarize the piano. His use of prepared piano techniques – adding things like felt, screws, and other found objects heard on tracks like “Guardrail” and “Sea Smoke” – turns the piano into a percussive, amorphous instrument. Furthermore, Topograph takes the piano out of its stereotypical setting of an opulent concert hall, pristine and spotless on a grand stage, and thrusts it into the wilderness. With Topograph, the piano is at home in the elements.
Throughout the album, simple yet cinematic chord progressions are laid under minimalistic melodies. The melodies are still full of character; Cosgrove doesn’t veer into pure chording, and the crescendos are not without a whistleable tune over the top. The second track, “Aubade,” was inspired by his time around the upper Mississippi River in Wisconsin, in the poetically named Driftless Area, and has a ear-worm four-note melody that is slingshotted into staggering heights by the elastic left hand.
In Topograph, the glacial pace of nature, its processes seen only under a microscope or over spans of time much longer than a lifetime, are made urgent and emotional. The album is a study of nature as much as it is of sound, and reflects the humbling and heightened feeling that both nature and music gives you — awe — captured in 39 minutes.