🎼 December 2024: Wrapping the Year
2024: progress on my first symphony, a number of other works and performances (including two I somehow forgot about) and links to other artists!
Hello!
I am Chris Krycho. It is December 31, 2024, and as is my wont, I am at hope sipping some whiskey and writing this missive. No parties for me: I go to bed early these days, even on holidays!
🎼 On the craft
This month, I thought it would be fitting to reflect a bit on what I have gotten done musically over the course of 2024! (Those of you who also read my main website will thus not feel gypped, given my promise to do just this in my 2024 in Review post.) This was a very good year for musical work, though not at all a good year for musical releases.
For the symphony, I finished the second movement and made significant progress on the third, and also did some minor revisions to the first. The result of that, by the numbers
- I started the year with 20 minutes, 38 seconds of music
- I ended the year with 30 minutes, 12 seconds of music
Net, then I wrote about 9½ minutes of symphonic music this year. Not bad at all, for something I was carving out on the side!
At the very beginning of the year, I composed a Sanctus for Epiphany back at the start of the year. If you missed it then (as many of you may have, since it preceded the launch of this newsletter) you can listen to a simple recording of it we made for our church musicians here:
I hope to return to that piece in 2025 and produce a better recording of it and get that up on Bandcamp, iTunes, and the various streaming services.
(As an aside: for those of you who are in churches which follow the liturgical calendar and may be looking for musical settings, you are welcome to use that piece; there are PDFs for the score, a lead sheet, and a chord chart on my post about the piece. I will also be uploading a choral score there in the next few days.)
In the early spring, I composed and released The Desert, a short solo piano work inspired by Lent:
I wrote a bit about that on my blog, because I had not yet launched a dedicated website or this newsletter!
The other big, fun part of the year also came back in the spring—seeing an aerial silks interpretation of my Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight:
One reason to do this kind of end-of-year review: I had, in the fullness of the rest of the year, actually forgotten entirely about the aerial silks fanfare interpretation… and, somehow, bizarrely, about having written and released The Desert at all. It simply fell out of my mind entirely! What a strange feeling.
There were a few other pieces of music-related work I did this year: setting up a dedicated music website—which needs massive revision, but it is is good that it exists—, launching this newsletter, and trying to do at least some degree of social media posting. To be honest, none of these efforts have a lot of traction… yet. This newsletter has seen some slow growth in both subscribers and page views, for which I am grateful, but social media is basically a void so far. I intend to keep at them, though, and to continue trying to find better ways to engage the broader contemporary classical/composed music community in the year ahead.
Finally, if you’re curious about just how many (or few!) listens music from a tiny independent composer like me gets, here are the play counts for my published music in 2024:
- The Desert: 227 plays across Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music.
- Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight: 515 plays across Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and the YouTube video of the recording (though about 100 of those were rehearsals of the aerial silks performance).
No purchases, and no other data available on other streaming services. Those numbers are not bad, to be honest—they are higher than I expected, in part because there is more happening via YouTube Music than I realized. What is not happening from any of those is making money. All told I have earned $3.40 total—not just this year—from any of the music I have on streaming services. This is not a pity party, just a clear accounting of reality: streaming services are very cool in that these pieces of music have been played over 700 times this year, but much less cool in that they pay basically nothing.
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Issues generally go out monthly—the only exception is when I publish a new piece of music!
🎵 Other notes
Two recommendations here!
The first is timely: every New Year’s Day, Robin Sloan reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight live, out loud, on a stream. I am hoping to tune in this year—finally; I have been wanting to for years!—and encourage you to do the same. He kicks it off tomorrow (as I publish this) at 10am Pacific Time.
Second, for the past few years, we have been huge fans of Psallos, a group of Christian artists who came out of Union University, who are working to create interpretations (not text settings) of all the New Testament epistles, as well as other music. I have never figured out quite how to describe them—indie folk–classical crossover? It’s quirky and quite unusual, in a way I find delightful. Anyway, this year they released two EPs: Advent Songs and Christmas Songs, and each has one of my favorite bits of contemporary classical writing of the whole year.
I expect that even those of you who are not Christians will find much to appreciate in these!
The tracks are of course available everywhere, but those are Apple Music links for the reasons I detailed in the August 2024 issue: Songwhip is Dead; Long Live… iTunes?. If you enjoy those tracks or the albums they are a part of, please buy them on Bandcamp to support their work most directly!
👋🏼 Happy December!
Here’s to a satisfying 2024, and hopefully to a lot of music in 2025! A sneak preview: I currently (tentatively!) plan to finish the third movement of the symphony, write a relatively brief work for a small chamber orchestra or similar-sized ensemble, and perhaps—perhaps—make some progress in earnest on the fourth movement of the symphony as well. Who knows what else will come up: more church music, more opportunities for collaborations, recordings of pieces that I have on the back burner ready to record should the opportunity present itself…
Thank you all for reading along this year. I am grateful for your support—listening, reading, replying, and sharing this with others. I hope you have had a good 2024, and I wish you the best in 2025.