Ben Richter

Ben Richter is a composer, accordionist, and director of Ghost Ensemble. Inspired by nonhuman consciousness and the potential of the act of listening to create experiences of community healing, Ben’s music orients toward emergent perceptual horizons to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales we do not experience in everyday life. As an accordionist, Ben explores preparations and techniques that expand the instrument’s microtonal and timbral capacities, harnessed in original composer-performer works like the immersive just-intonation five-accordion composition Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean, hailed by Stephen Smoliar (The Rehearsal Studio) as “likely to offer a profound impact on the very nature of listening.” Ben’s recent collaborators have included composers Elizabeth Adams, Marguerite Brown, Laura Cetilia, Carolyn Chen, Nomi Epstein, Catherine Lamb, Sky Macklay, Miya Masaoka, Phill Niblock, Michael Pisaro, Teodora Stepančić, and Cassia Streb. A student of Pauline Oliveros, Ben Richter holds a DMA from CalArts, MM from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and BA from Bard College, and has taught at CalArts, at CUNY, and as a Deep Listening facilitator through the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer.