Biographical Notes...



Ben Kettlewell is an award-winning composer and an accomplished guitarist and synthesist of many years standing. He has been involved with almost every aspect of music, at one time or another, for over four decades. Ben lived for many years on Cape Cod, until he joined forces with Mairéid in 1997.

Ben lived with his grandparents, Wayland and Novella White, on the family farm in Belvidere, Perquimans County, beside The Great Dismal Swamp in Eastern North Carolina. At age 12, he was sent to Baltimore, Maryland to live with his father- a NASA/Westinghouse electrical engineer.



Ben began his professional career paying his way through art school (Maryland Institute College of Art) as lead guitarist in several locally well-known folk, rock, blues and jazz ensembles. He went on to compose music for television productions and multimedia projects, including award-winning original scores for theatre productions with the legendary Provincetown Theatre Company, (the celebrated off-shoot of The Provincetown Players, launched in 1916 by Eugene O'Neil, Susan Gaspell, and "Jig" Cook).
His compositions in the electronic and ambient music genre have been recorded and released on British and American labels. As well as being an accomplished acoustic and electronic musician, and a celebrated painter, Ben trained as a website developer in the early 90s with Emily Johnson, a member of the team of web developers working on third generation (HTML 3.0) language at MIT.

Performing for a WOMR-FM benefit concert, back in 1986, for the opening of the Wellfleet Cinema, Wellfleet, MA.

Ben has been a music journalist for nearly thirty years and was a WOMR public radio presenter for ten years. His book, Electronic Music Pioneers (2002), Pro Music Press / Thompson Publishing, (distributed by Hal Leonard Corp.) is based on a radio series, broadcast over two years across the US and Canada, for which he was awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities. He is editor of the online music magazine, Alternate Music Press - one of the first eclectic music publications on the Internet. A summary of Ben's contribution to early 'electronica' networks was published on UltraVillage, January 2020.

Ben is working on his novel, "The Little Quaker Boy", which tells the story of his Scottish ancestors who migrated to North America during the 16th and 17th centuries – a rare glimpse at over 400 years of history in one of North America's oldest settlements. Ben's direct Scottish ancestor, Flora White was a lawyer and a Quaker, and a widow with seven sons when she avoided the English "Quaker Terror" by migrating to North America in 1663 – settling in Perquimans County, North Carolina (Perquimans translates as Cherokee/Tsalagi "land of beautiful women"!). Several of Ben’s relatives were registered in the Dawes Roll of 1910. Their descendants, spared from the Trail of Tears evacuation of 1838/39, continue to live in Perquimans County, NC. His ancestors include John White, the artist and cartographer who, in 1585, set out on Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to the New World on a voyage to the Outer Banks of North Carolina under Raleigh’s plan to establish a settlement in Virginia. During this period White made a series of over seventy watercolor drawings of indigenous people, plants, and animals. Despite their extraordinary significance and insights on "traditional Native American culture" the watercolors were not published until the twentieth century and are now preserved in the British Museum.
Note: Professor of History Noeleen McIlvenna has documented in eye-opening detail the early migration of the Quakers to North America in "A Very Mutinous People" (2009). See excerpts HERE: "These ideas, ... and all those very mutinous people, eventually became accepted as the quintessential American values." – Noeleen McIlvenna, 2009



Ben's Elements Art Gallery, Provincetown, MA, winner of the 1996 Niche Award for "Top 100 Retailers of American Craft".

Contact us for more information

Interview by Mark Griffey, UltraVillage, published in January 2020
Interview by Chris Myer, LQ Graphics, June 2007 newsletter
Interview by Nadja Maril, New England Arts Magazine (1993)
Interview (pdf) by J. Engstrom, AfterTouch Music Magazine (1993)