Accordion with Ben R.

Ben is an experienced professional accordionist, composer, and founding director of Ghost Ensemble, and a former professor at the City University of New York. As a solo accordionist, Ben draws from contemporary chamber music, experimental improvisation, and traditional klezmer practice to create atmospheric music that explores a timeless, mystical space at the intersection of memory and imagination. As a composer, Ben creates chamber music that explores sound-worlds of constant transformation, combining subtly shifting timbres and sliding microtonal fluctuations to create music that critic George Grella has described as “a look, perhaps, into a different dimension … the music sounds like something incomprehensibly massive is passing by, slowly.”  Ben has performed with The Dresden Dolls, Ghost Ensemble, SEM Ensemble, Pauline Oliveros, Butch Morris, the Surrealist Training Circus, The Land of Dreams, Over A Cardboard Sea, and Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains. He studied contemporary composition at Bard College (New York) and performance with the experimental composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. With research focused on parahypnotic phenomena in music, he completed an MM at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in 2012. He has composed new music for the American Symphony Orchestra, Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra, SEM Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble, Ostravska Banda, Wild Rumpus, accordion duo Toeac, It Nije Ensemble, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, and Da Capo Chamber Players. His most recent album, "Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean", was released on Infrequent Seams in 2017.