Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! (Yes, it’s still Christmas; look up what the 12 Days of Christmas actually are if you’re not a liturgical calendar nerd and especially only know it from the song. Then go have some more festive food!) This month, a look back at 2025 for me as a composer. What worked? What didn’t? What kinds of things might I do differently in 2026? (I just typo’d that as 2036, and that’s an interesting question, too, but I won’t be doing that today, sorry.)

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.

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🎼 On the craft

For this month, something a little different than my usual essay: some reflections on the craft in more concrete terms.

(The video version of this will be up in a day or two. Unfortunately, I came down with a chest cold on December 30th, which is making it hard to record a video!)

Doing the work

I was, for the most part, able to actually just get the work done this year, thanks to the rhythm I found back in October 2024. For most of the year, I would get up, do my morning devotions, and then spend 20–30 minutes composing, mostly working on the symphony. Even with disruptions caused by a nasty herniated disc issue in my lower back (which you can read more about that here if you care to), I was able to make steady progress for most of the year—the only exceptions being June and much of October, November, and December, when both the pain and resulting disruption to sleep and life from my herniated disc were at their worst.

I cannot say enough good about this sort of simple, basic routine as a way of making steady progress on these kinds of creative endeavors outside the day job. As difficult as it is to be steady and consistent—goodness knows it is going to be some work to build back up the routine here going into 2026 after these health challenges!—it means you never completely lose momentum. Ten notes on the page is not much, and there were many days this year when that was all I managed, but ten notes is more than zero, and ten notes on the page day after day gets you somewhere. This year it got me through the rest of the third movement of my first symphony as well as much of the work on Holy Saturday.

The latter took more dedicated time and attention than 20–40-minute blocks to get across the finish line, as will surprise no one who has done this kind of work, musical or otherwise. The simple reality is that small amounts of consistency will take you a long way but they often will not take you the whole way.

Happily, I was able to take a few days in the weeks I had off before I started a new job in April to get it across the line—and “days” is being accurate there. It took several days to record and mix and master the session so it was ready for release. (Thanks and credit again to my old colleague and friend Bryan Levay for that mix and master session! I always learn a ton working with him.)

The numbers

So what did that consistency get me?

Composing: I wrote my way out to the conclusion of Mvt. III of my first symphony, including throwing away a substantial chunk of it that wasn’t working and writing new material there instead. I also did a substantial revision of Mvt. II. Both of them need a lot more revision, but that is what first drafts are for. The net was a mere 2 minutes of additional “play time” on the symphony from where I was last year, but that change is misleading: it represents something like 5–6 minutes of new music and a lot of revision.

I also wrote all of Holy Saturday. Each of its three different versions is around 3:40–3:45. I do count each version as unique music, because while the underlying material is the same, each version required a non-trivial amount of orchestration work. All told, it’s another three pieces totaling 11:10 of released music. The “released” part of that a big deal: one of my goals is to keep releasing something every year. It is difficult for me to release much more than that, given my other commitments, but it keeps me honest. Music is meant to be listened to!

Finally, I spent a very small amount of time on another release: a very non-professional recording of our very non-professional church choir leading our congregation in singing the Sanctus for Epiphany that I wrote in 2024. I’m proud of the music (though I also learned a few important things from writing it!), and if the recording isn’t amazing, that’s all right. I thought it worth putting out into the world, and will continue to do so with these kinds of works for our congregation, in the hopes they may find a home in other similar congregations.

Listening: How did the year go in terms of people actually listening to my music? This is, after all, the point! Well: better than 2024, though for strange reasons.

• Apple Music: 68 streams, down from 104 in 2024

• Spotify: 1,025 streams from 507 listeners, up from 302 streams from 117 listeners in 2024. This one needs some clarification though: I ended up on someone’s reasonably well-subscribed playlist—accidentally, as far as I can tell; the rest of the music is fairly mainstream and The Desert is many good things but “mainstream” is not one of the descriptors I would apply to it.

• Bandcamp: 48 plays and 2 sales, up from 13 plays and 0 sales

• YouTube Music: 271 plays, up slightly from 246 in 2024. Interestingly, The Desert got many more plays upon release in 2024 than did Holy Saturday in 2025.

• Amazon Music: 15 streams from 8 listeners, compared to 14 streams from 6 listeners in 2024

There were an additional very small number of “plays” from other services as well as from the ways I attached them to Instagram reels etc.

Money: All of that for all time has so far come out to a grand total of $4.16 from streams (DistroKid doesn’t give me an easy way that I can find to get total streaming payouts for just this year.) I can almost buy a pastry at a coffee shop with it! Meanwhile, the two of you who bought Holy Saturday on Bandcamp netted out $16, or nearly 4× as much.

Streaming is the main way I get heard, but it definitely isn’t making me any money, especially at the tiny, tiny number of people listening to my music.

This newsletter: I started the year with 46 subscribers and ended it with 52, plus two known feed-based subscribers. (One reason I use Buttondown is that it makes it easy for people to subscribe in a feed reader rather than just by email.) Again, my audience is tiny, so I’m really grateful for each of you. I’m also delighted that over the course of publishing the newsletter I have gained a few folks who are not in the initial cohort of friends and family I invited to subscribe. That’s particularly validating, so if that’s you, extra thanks for following along!

All told, I wrote over 20,000 words for this newsletter, which makes up a sizable chunk of my overall writing for the year! It took a good chunk of time, but I enjoyed it and the monthly routine remains a helpful forcing function for making sure I have something interesting to say.

YouTube: My channel remains tiny. It did grow by 46 subscribers, from 27 to 73. It also grew from 3,177 views in 2024 to 9,670 in 2025. This is encouraging, even if these are tiny numbers by YouTube standards: it still shows people are interested in the stuff I am putting into the world. The breakdown of what got viewed on the channel is telling, though: 6,798 out of those 9,670 views, or fully 70% of them, are for two videos about little techniques for using Dorico. Another 2,027, or about 21%, were the handful of YouTube Shorts I published. That leaves just 9% for everything else, including both the YouTube Music listening counted above.

By comparison, all views of the video essay versions of the On the Craft essays totaled just 285 views. Some of this is no doubt because I am still finding my way into sufficiently interesting and polished videos that people will watch them. Some of it is likely that very few people have much interest in what I have to say about these things! I haven’t really earned that interest yet: I am not a successful or well-known composer. Why should someone pay attention to what I have to say? I also have not tried to (and will not try to) game the algorithm with them—which means I am not likely to have one of those video essays “blow up”.

The first lesson is simply that putting up more little videos about working with Dorico is probably a good investment of my time! Most people who come to the channel for those videos won’t stick around, but a few will. The effort level is much lower than making the video essays, and those videos are obviously valuable to other people out there. I do think the investment in the video essays is nonetheless valuable in a few ways: learning how to work with video as a medium, building a back catalog for when I do hopefully earn people’s attention, and providing another venue for people to find my work, however limited its effect so far.

Other social media: This is basically a great void of nothingness. As far as I can tell, these did nothing for me. So let me talk about that a little.

Social media and “brand” building

At the start of the year, I set out with a goal of having a more continuous public presence on social media. My hope was that by being “out there”—interacting with others, sharing what I was working on regularly, and generally being “present” in those spaces, I would increase the chances that people would above all find and connect with my music, but secondarily subscribe to my newsletter and thereby become part of my “audience” so they can follow and support my composition work in the long term.

The problem, as I suspect anyone who has tried this knows, is that being active on social media is a massive time-drain. Posting regularly is time-consuming enough: somewhat for purely textual material (Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Threads, etc.), much more so for anything involving images or especially video (Instagram, YouTube shorts, etc.). The real drain comes from the interaction that is more or less essential for that to be a meaningful way for others to find your work.

My summary of this is: it basically didn’t work, at all. There’s a really important qualifier to that, though: I was terribly inconsistent. I started the year trying to post short Instagram videos and YouTube shorts semi regularly – once a week or so – but I ended up falling off that horse simply because it was more work than I was willing to do. Recording a little vertical format video is not too big of a deal on its own, but adding nice-looking captions (especially if I want them to use the typography I use everywhere for my music) is a different story. Unfortunately, that work is something of a necessity for those kinds of videos so they are scannable in the context of a feed of others such “content”.

To have any hope of getting results from social media, I would need to spend a an hour or two every week prepping “content” for the next week Instagram and Facebook and Threads and Bluesky and Mastodon and YouTube, or to have a part-time part-time “social media manager” to do the same. At present, that simply does not pay for itself! I don’t have a lot of extra time in this phase of life, and what I do have is full up for other commitments. And as noted above, my music doesn’t make any money! That is also time I could spend doing other things I value much more, not least composing itself. I recognize the necessity of some meta-work, but I want to keep my focus on the work itself.

Net, I have not yet decided how I will approach this space in 2026, but if I had to guess, I will more or less abandon social media beyond YouTube in favor of focusing. I may post simple textual updates and links to this newsletter and any video content, but little more. We will see!

🎵 Other notes

Just one recommendation this month: the Miró Quartet’s lovely Christmas album Hearth. The quarter commissioned 15—fif-teen!—different composers to create arrangements of classic Christmas music. Subscribers may recognize Kevin Puts and Anna Clyne as composers I have recommended in the past. The long list of others has given me a nice baker’s dozen of composers whose other works I’m eager to dig into in the new year. Perhaps the standout arrangement (not to say the best, but the one that will rightly hook you for the rest of it) on the album is of “Deck the Halls”:

🎤 Links, updates, &c.

Between the holidays, children being on break, and still being a bit in recovery from these back issues, I didn’t write much new music this month. I certainly did not get any significant revisions of the symphony done. Nor indeed any at all: alas. However, I mentioned a couple months ago that I thought I might write some music to go with the YouTube channel and specifically for the video versions of the On the Craft essays I publish every month. Well: I did! You can listen to it here:

It’s a very, very simple bit of music “recorded” entirely with my go-to BBC Symphony Orchestra samples in Logic Pro. A little opening melodic movement, and then five simple chords spread throughout the orchestra. It was a nice little exercise in seeing if I could produce something that worked both for the videos and as a standalone cue. I think I succeeded! It’s nothing particularly special, but it works.

👋🏼 Happy December!

It is a bit odd to be bidding 2025 A.D. adieu, and yet here we are. Thanks for following along with and encouraging me this year. Here’s to more composing and other kinds of creativity in 2026!