On Feb. 25, the Fort Smith Symphony String Quartet and composer Amos Cochran will perform an evening of his music at Van Buren’s King Opera Houses as an installment of their new Chamber Music Series called “Perspectives.”
(Tickets for the event are $10 and can be purchased at tickets.fortsmithsymphony.org)
Cochran, 38, grew up in Fayetteville and now lives in Van Buren. He is an Emmy-nominated “sound artist” whose compositions have earned many accolades, including a 2010 Kennedy Center Excellence in Composing Award and a premier at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
Cochran often performs live with piano, strings, and electronics, but he also creates site-specific audio-visual immersive experiences. His work has been featured at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Unexpected, University of Houston, and Artfields, where he was awarded the Merit Award for his installation Memory Dissolve.
Cochran talked with the Democrat-Gazette in advance of the Fort Smith concert, and videos of his work are available to view below.
Q. It must be kind of cool to be able to list “composer” as your occupation on your tax forms. How does one develop the aspiration to become a composer? Was it something that you thought about as a child? In high school?
My life as an artist has always evolved when responding to life changes. Growing up in Fayetteville I played bass in many bands. That was originally what I wanted to do.
When my daughter was born I didn’t want to be gone every night playing so I asked myself how do I continue to create music at home? I got one of those old plastic white MacBooks and started making music in GarageBand. At this time I had moved to Van Buren and noticed that the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith had a composition teacher. One day I knocked on the door of his (Chuck Booker) office and said, “I want to take composition lessons.” He said, “Well it doesn’t really work that way.”
I was quite persistent and ended up having a weekly lesson. I wrote a few pieces for concert band and honestly didn’t have a great experience with it. Mr. Booker was wonderful and I was learning a lot from him but the overall experience and interaction I was having with musicians didn’t feel right.
I grew up playing in the garage with my friends and we would rehearse for hours; with the concert band we had one rehearsal and then performed. The music never sounded like I wanted and I wasn’t able to have the time I needed with musicians. At this point I had made a lot of music on the Macbook and was giving out CDs to anyone that would perhaps lead to a composing gig. I ended up writing music for a theater production at UAFS and a friend of a friend heard the CD I was passing around and asked if I wanted to score her film. I really enjoyed the collaboration involved with film scoring, it felt closer to being in a band than the concert music. I then began to spend my time building relationships in that realm.
I think feeling as though I “have arrived” is something that I will always struggle with to some extent. Being an artist is a fairly terrifying life path at times. At this point I will say that I trust the process, the ups and downs, and uncertainty that come with it. The accolades that have come my way are nice and I’m always grateful for them, but what I love more is the continued relationship building that happens when you are committed to being an artist. The opportunities for evolving my body of work outside of film scoring has been quite vast in the last few years and that is where the excitement really is for me. There is validation in finding new people to work with that want to work with me or ask me to work with them because my body of work resonates with them.
Q. How would you describe your “job” (as opposed to your “work” — which would be the performances, recordings, scores etc. that are a product of the job)? I mean, do you have a routine day? Do you spend a lot of time reaching out and networking, Zooming potential collaborators and clients, or do you sit at you piano and play all day?
Honestly it’s hard to separate idea of “job” and “work.”
It feels like a very blurred line which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It totally depends on the current needs of the most pressing project. I have a notebook system at this point that I rely on — before I go to bed I always plan out the next day and then I just do what the notebook says and don’t question it!
There is a lot of sending emails, making budgets in spreadsheets, looking at calendars, organizing musicians, coordinating with venues, grant writing, notating music for various things, Zoom meetings about current projects, planning/creating social media content and promotion plans for whatever happens to be the next public thing. There is the occasional rare day where I can play piano all day. Those usually happen closer to performances.
I don’t read music well at all and always play from memory, to get to the level of comfort that I need requires playing songs over and over and over which I really enjoy. When film scores are being worked on I’m still not sure how they end up happening! Usually I will work early in the morning or late at night on scores. The middle of the day is alway a distracting time and scores take a very different kind of focus. A lot of time I’m bouncing between multiple things.
I’m also very deadline driven and (when possible) tend to use procrastination as a creative tool. This sounds bad but over the years I have learned that thinking about something as long as possible before you actually make it creates better results than making 100 versions of a thing for months. It all depends on the project. There is always time that I spend writing ideas in the notebook, just thinking about what to do next. I really do think it’s important to find time to be bored and tinker around with ideas that don’t actually have an an output or make sense yet.
Q. And how would you describe the work? My presumption, listening to yoiur work is that you’re genre agnostic, like most authentic musicians I know.
“Genre Agnostic” is a very interesting term, I like it.
I had the conversation the other day with Jasper Logan on the KUAF Lunch Hour podcast and we landed on “Ambient Classical” which I kind of like. I think on the surface people see what I do as “classical.” Piano plus strings equals Classical. However I think the structures of my music are much closer to electronic music.
Most of my personal music (non-film score music) has repeating patterings and longer phrases that are built upon. Often the strings are used more as texture than they are melodic. My string players and I joke that “by the third whole note we need to be crying but by the end of the 4th whole note we all need to be OK again.”
Most all of my music comes from a place of processing the harder things in life. I don’t use lyrics so all of the emotional build is based around how I want the audience to experience the texture and sound. I also have a lot of moments in my music that allow for improvisation reminds me more of how one would approach a jazz tune than anything classical. Maybe “Emo Ambient Classical.” Hahaha.
I try to not really worry about WHAT it is and focus more on the WHY am I making it? Is it coming from an honest place? It is something that I enjoy? I spent most of December actually writing a whole bunch of electronic music that is completely different than anything I have released. We will see where that goes. The piano and strings and electronic music is what most folks know my music to be but I don’t feel like I’m required to stay there forever. When writing film scores I have to adapt musically to what the film needs. More recently I have been working on projects that are asking for a sound that is closer to my personal work, but in the past I have had to lean more into country, electronic, folk, etc to get where the director is wanting the film to be.
Q. How important is proficiency on your instrument to what you do? And do you have a favorite instrument and, if so, what is it?
I think it completely depends on what your goals are. I always say that I’m not a very good piano player and I mean that. But I am the best piano player of MY music. No one can play my songs like me and in turn if you handed me the sheet music for “Claire de lune ” or someone else’s music it would take me months to learn it and not be very good. I still think I’m a “better” bass player than piano player.
Now, my string players, I want them to be completely proficient at their instrument and able to play whatever I put on the page and also be able to float around in the more improvised abstract moments. So it is and it isn’t important to be proficient. I have some friends who writing amazing music and have no idea what the notes are on the piano and I adore that approach. There is actually something very genuine about creating from a place of little knowledge about something and you are creating strictly from emotion and whether or not you like the thing. What is important is understanding your goals and what you are hoping to accomplish in a given situation.
My favorite piano is the one I have at home in my room. It’ s a Baldwin upright that I have become very comfortable on and where most of my writing happens. However that is a bit of a curse because I’m always having to perform on other pianos(I refuse to play a keyboard live. There have only been a few moments when its completely unavoidable but I will say “no” 95% of the time to gigs that can’t provide a real piano.)
I LOVE the Van Claiborne grand piano in the Great Hall in Crystal Bridges. It is an amazing instrument that responds to dynamics in ways that no other grand I have ever played does. In general I don’t like grands. I prefer an upright with felt over the string to give it a softer sound. On my own I play a lot of acoustic guitar and I have a Taylor 412ce that is my favorite. I’ve had it since high school.
Lastly, I have a MacBook Pro that I only use for live shows and I really love that computer. I adjust levels and tweak effects constantly through out my performances and the way the mouse click feels is exactly how I want it to. That may seem odd to think of a specific computer as an instrument but it’s true.
Q. Your body of work is quite diverse — film scoring, releasing albums, performing live, sound installations, audio-visual installations — and you’re the founder/creative director of the experimental music showcase ArcadeNow. How do you define what you do at this point?
After going through Artist Inc with Mid America Arts Alliance, I have come to define myself as a multi-disciplinary artist. My body of work has evolved in what feels like a very organic way. I never really set out to do a lot of what I’m doing but through creating work I have found curiosity in new kinds of work.
In the last few years I have come to understand that the context in which something is presented is really the most important part. I have been really into watching old Brian Eno interviews from German television that are on YouTube and he has a line that really resonated with me: “An artist really has 2 jobs. The first is to make the work and the second (and perhaps most important) is to create for the context for which the work is experienced.”
I didn’t realize it until I heard him say that but creating different context for things is really what I have been doing for the last few years. An example — I have an audio visual piece called “Memory Dissolve” that was designed originally to be projected on a huge gallery wall with surround speakers. It lasts about 14 minutes and plays on a loop all day. The visuals are very abstract color shifts and the audio is based around a piano piece with a lot of abstract textures and violin and cello solos. Presenting the piece in a gallery makes it an audio visual installation. If I were to release the audio on Spotify and put the video up on my website it becomes a more traditional “music single and a music video.” Nothing changes about the piece other than context in which it is experienced, thus changing what it is. I’m fascinated by this and finding the right context (or knowing the wrong context) for my newer work is become very important for me.
Gallery: Composer Amos Cochran
