August 31, 2025

🎼 August 2025: Teachers

Nothing compares to having someone who knows more than you do and who is invested in your success.

Hello from the end of August here in Colorado, where autumn seems to have arrived early. It is splendid. It may also be a trap: will sweltering days return? Maybe! But in the meantime, music is getting written by yours truly, and the cool late summer/early autumn weather has combined with my daughters’ return to school to get me thinking on what gifts schooling and teachers are.

But first, the meta bits—

First, this newsletter you’re reading is a monthly recurring update by me: Chris Krycho: a composer of contemporary classical music like Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight, The Desert, and Holy Saturday. If someone forwarded this to you and you like it, you can subscribe here. You can also unsubscribe any time!

Second, you can watch a video version of the essay section of this newsletter on YouTube:

—and now, into the meat of this thing!

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🎼 On the craft

There is no substitute for having a teacher: someone who knows the craft inside and out far better than you do and can push you beyond your comfort, beyond your current limits, beyond what you will think to go chase down yourself. There is no substitute for someone who does in fact know more and better than you do.

But I am an autodidact. Most obviously, my entire career in software has been built on being able to teach myself the things I need to know about software engineering and computer science on the fly, as needed and on demand. The same goes for running, for the majority of my theological education (an M.Div. notwithstanding), writing, and, yes, composition (undergraduate studies notwithstanding). Certainly my initial forays into composition were like this. They preceded my introduction to music theory and often outpaced it; this was so even in college when I was studying music theory formally in parallel with my lessons in composition.

So far as it goes, that is all well and good. So far as it goes. There is no substitute for being pushed in a way that it is difficult at best to push yourself, though.

I have written before about the sense I have that my undergraduate studies in music represent something of a missed opportunity. It is not that I completely wasted that time, but that I could have done much more with the time that I had—and I do not have now. I do not have a teacher now. No one is going to grill me on the spot in an unscheduled quiz in class about some sequence of harmonies that tend to show up only in jazz and jazz-influenced late-20th- or early-21st-century harmony.

It may therefore simply not be possible to learn those things as deeply working on one’s own as it is with a good teacher. Not least because of the ways a teacher will guide you that you never would yourself. A teacher will force you down paths your own interests would not take you down. A good teacher knows what you may profit from as distinct from what you may enjoy or even what you may be interested in. A great teacher knows how to unlock your potential in ways you could not fathom by sequencing those exploration and assignments just so.

One might think that with mastery, one leaves behind the need for a teacher. I do not think this is so. To the contrary, in fact, many of the best practitioners of any given art continue to receive instruction throughout their lives. Certainly this is true of great athletes and great performers. It is true that most truly great creative artists—painters, composers, authors—come to a season where they no longer have formal pedagogy as an everyday part of their lives. Notice, though, that the best also often continue to have informal sessions with other artists of the same ilk: people who can give them feedback, people who have expertise in parts of the domain they do not share, people whose interests have taken them in other directions. And if nothing else, we all show up to the school of reality: put a score in front of an orchestra and you will soon learn whether that new idea actually works with real players on real instruments.

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An important aside: It isn’t impostor syndrome if you are actually ignorant of important things, or your skills in those things are lacking or under-developed. I have a lot of music theory background, for example, but none of it is fresh, and little of it is especially ready to hand. I can analyze a progression (including one I came up with intuitively), and I can think about variations on it that may work: but not the way someone who has worked with music theory day in and day out for the years I have spent writing software full time.

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There may come a day when I can enjoy and benefit from formal instruction in composition again. In the meantime, though, I am left reflecting on what I can do now to deepen my knowledge: to put that autodidactic skill to work here. Time to pick back up my slow read through Open Music Theory, perhaps—and to find ways to do ear-training drills along the way, and to dig into the harmonic progressions beyond the Common Practice era, and perhaps even to spend a bunch of time listening to and studying jazz simply to get a better handle on the kinds of things I do not know.

Will that close the gaps between me and composers who live and breathe these things? It will not. Comparison is a fool‘s errand, though. (Inspiration, I will take!) Studying will make me a better composer myself, and that is enough.

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🎵 Other notes

I.

This month I have been returning regularly to Ezio Bosso’s works, and I had to triple-check that I had not already recommended his music to you, because it has become increasingly important to me over the past half decade. Of contemporary composers of concert music, I return to Bosso’s work more often than anyone but Arvo Pärt. I would guess that many of you are unfamiliar with Bosso: an Italian composer who passed away in 2020, only 48 years old. I first came across his music in 2017, likely from an Apple Music “New for You” playlist.¹ It was one more sorrow of 2020 when he succumbed to a neurodegenerative disease he had been fighting since brain surgery for a tumor in the early 2010s.

Bosso wrote in richly Neo-romantic style infused with the fruits of minimalism. He particularly emphasized dense string textures and piano works, but he could also deploy those sounds in full orchestral contexts. Some of his works remind me just a touch of Arvo Pärt. Others are off in a very different sonic space. He was also incredibly prolific: his body of work includes film scores, symphonies, theater, opera, concertos, and a great deal of chamber music.

A few of my favorites of his:

• Six Breaths, with the London Cellos
• Symphony No. 1 “Oceans”, for symphony orchestra
• Music for Weather Elements, for piano, violin, and cello
• Seasong 1 to 4 and Other Little Stories, for violin, cello, and string orchestra

Give one of those a listen, and I think you’ll likely find yourself hooked! I am hopeful that we’ll see the rest of his works recorded over the decades ahead, because they deserve a wider audience and a longer life.

I was delighted to hear in a comment from one of you last month of a shared delight in Rachel Bolger’s recordings. Whether by comment or reply to an email, I genuinely love the conversations that come out of these dispatches. Keep them coming my way!

On which note: what late 20th or early 21st century composer’s works do you most often return to?

II.

This interview of Gordy Haab, composer for the music to many a Star Wars video game, hosted by Austin Wintory, was a fascinating look behind the curtain of composing for media. Haab has—as the title of the episode proclaims—composed more Star Wars music than John Williams: an astonishing reality.

I had heard Haab’s work when playing Battlefront over a decade ago, but not much since; meanwhile Wintory’s score for Journey is one of my favorite compositions for media (film, television, game, etc.) of the 21st century. Both of these men are absolute pros with deep knowledge of music theory and the music industry alike, and their discussion was wide-ranging. (A caveat: both of them swear several times over the course of the episode, so not for sensitive or small ears!)

III.

Tom MacWright² described his Prepper-style music hoarding approach to his music library a few years ago, and it very much aligns with my own views on my music libraries! (See last August’s issue: Songwhip is Dead; Long Live… iTunes?) I take a slightly different, somewhat easier approach by using the Apple Music app’s support for syncing files you add to your library as well as those from the Apple Music streaming service, but the gist is the same. Buy your music, from a source that gives artists the squarest deal possible.

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🎤 Links, updates, &c.

Steady progress this month on the symphony. No big distractions, no huge breakthroughs, just solidly marching on toward the conclusion of Mvt. III. Over the course of the month I managed not only to get from 7:34 to 8:17 (43 seconds of new music!), but also to do some revisions here and there in parts of the rest of it. Several morning stints were taken up by analyzing what I had already written: I have a strong sense of harmonic and melodic lines, and often write things that make good sense but then need to go figure out what I did so that I can actually build on and develop them coherently. This time: a lot of relative chords built off the dominant!

I am mulling a great deal on the shape of the dynamics in this movement as I head toward its conclusion. If you pay attention to many of the greatest symphonies, you’ll notice that they are distinctly not simple crescendos and decrescendos, but often build and fall back, and build again and fall back again, and build again and fall back yet again, before finally reaching the climax. This pattern is often accompanied by reiteration and development of the key thematic materials of that section of the movement, or by returning to early parts of the movement before swelling again. It is a musical rising tide: waves crashing, then receding, then crashing again higher on the shore, until at last they reach their farthest point.

My main goal for the symphony is simply to write something good. But a secondary goal is of course to learn and grow. Those go hand in hand: the best way to make something good is to learn and grow. So where I find a particular point where practicing a particular technique seems fitting for the artistic goals, I am doing just that. You can see in this waveform view of the piece that I am, in fact, making that exact move quite a lot in this movement, including the big swell followed by a big dip and then two smaller swell-and-dip sections at the very end:

Looking at that shape got me looking at the shapes for the other movements as they stand, too. I realized that I am likelier to write repeated crescendos with drops back to quiet than I am to write smooth decrescendos that leap suddenly back to brilliant sound before falling off again. Something to explore in the future!

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Dorico has a neat feature that allows you to export statistics about a project: all the nitty-gritty details that actually make up the mechanics of a score. These numbers don’t tell you everything about the state of the symphony, but they do tell you some things.

• Bars: 965
• Notes: 26,629
• Key signatures: 13
• Time signatures: 22
• Dynamics: 4,007
• Immediate tempos: 25
• Gradual tempos: 6
• Rehearsal marks: 81

When I see those actual numbers, the amount of time this takes seems a lot more reasonable to me. Nearly a thousand bars of music with tens of thousands of notes is no joke.

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👋🏼 Happy August!

That’s it for August. Next month, something else. I might allow myself a treat of writing a few tiny bits of music for the video versions of these newsletter updates (and embedding them in the newsletter so you can play them as you go? Maybe!)—after all, what kind of composer doesn’t have music for his own videos?!? This one, to date: too busy working steadily on the symphony instead. Maybe, maybe. One way or another, I’ll be back at the end of September.