Ben Richter

Artist Statement

I am a composer, accordionist, ensemble director, and educator, engaging with sound through chamber and orchestral composition, experimental accordion performance, Deep Listening practice, and intermedia collaboration at the intersections of instrumental music, film, sound art, and immersive theater. These distinct yet interwoven practices nourish one another in the cultivation of fragile, constantly transforming sound-worlds that deepen perception of social and ecological interconnection and auralize the relationship between our lives and the manifold periodicities of deep time. Inspired by the fractal recursion of ecosystems and the infinite perspectives of the more-than-human world, my compositions orient toward uncommon orders of magnitude in musical parameters, exploring gradually morphing timbres, acoustic phenomena, and the thresholds where pitch becomes rhythm and harmonic interval becomes beating rate. Traversing these liminal zones, my music aims to offer an aural metaphor for polytemporality, listening toward the vast and infinitesimal timescales beyond everyday experience.

Ben Richter performs "Archaeon", Oak Spring Garden Foundation, June 2022

Bio

Ben Richter is a composer, accordionist, and founding director of Ghost Ensemble. Inspired by nonhuman consciousness, Ben’s music orients toward interacting gradual processes that cross acoustic thresholds to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales of geologic and ecological systems. Ben’s recent commissions include experimental chamber works for Diapason Brass, Loadbang, House On Fire, Jack Dettling, Jeonghyeon Joo, and Margaret Lancaster, as well as music/sound in intermedia collaborations with UMass-Amherst’s Futuring Lab and Y3K exhibitions, Paige Campbell, Margot Douaihy, Lei Han, Edie Meidav, and Goldie Poblador. As an accordionist, Ben explores intonation and airflow preparations that extend the instrument’s microtonal and timbral capacities, with collaborating composers and in original works such as Aurogeny (2023) and Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean (2017). Ben’s recent music has been supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Eastern Frontier Foundation, Epsilon Spires, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Hambidge, I-Park, and Art Omi, among others, and released on Blue Tapes, greyfade, Indexical, Infrequent Seams, New World Records, Sawyer Editions, and Sedimental. An active Deep Listening facilitator in the tradition of early mentor Pauline Oliveros, Ben holds a Performer-Composer DMA from CalArts and has taught at CalArts and CUNY.

www.benrichtermusic.com