February 28, 2025

🎼 February 2025: Note to Self – Work Harder

What I wish I could go back and tell my college-age self, about how much harder I could work than I knew—and how big the dividends would be if I did.

Happy end-of-February, dear newsletter readers!

I have spent this month trying to do one thing: practice.

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In case you’re new here: I’m Chris Krycho, a composer of what we mostly call “classical music”, misnomer though it be. My sound is somewhere between John Williams and John Tavener, depending on the work. This is my monthly newsletter about my work as a composer: an essay and some links, at the end of every single calendar month. Thanks for reading! Now let’s get into it!

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🎼 On the craft

If you’d like, you can also watch a video version of this essay:

When I was in college, pursuing music composition as part of my undergraduate studies, I had a pretty annoying flaw: I was good enough at my subjects that I could do a solid job and get by with mostly A’s on that basis. This may sound like bragging, but it turns out—as many smart and talented people have discovered—that it is in fact a trap from which it is difficult to escape. You can tell yourself (I told myself, certainly) that you are working hard. It can even be true that you are working harder than you did at other points in life, or than any number of the people around you. And even so: not working nearly as hard as you could. That was me in college: not working nearly as hard as I could.

I am, as a number of you will know, a serious recreational runner. (This connects, I promise.) I took up the sport just under 15 years ago, to get back in shape from a debilitating bout of mono: a story I told at some length elsewhere. As I came back from that, I decided I wanted to try running a half marathon, and the habit stuck. I ran reasonably well, and improved over the course of my 20s and even into my mid-30s. I thought I had probably roughly maxed out my ability to get faster, not least because I had always considered myself a fairly untalented runner. By comparison with the pros, that’s true. But it turns out I wasn’t so much untalented as I was just… not working that hard. Over the past two years, I have learned how to work a lot harder, and—unsurprisingly—I have gotten a lot faster.¹ I had no idea how hard I could work. I think I still have not really gotten close to my physical limits. I am still learning to work much harder than I had any idea I could work.

I could say almost exactly the same about music.

Back in college, I had access to a music library full of scores and recordings. I could listen to basically any piece of the classical repertoire with a nice copy of the score right in front of me any time I wanted. And I had lots of time to spend on that sort of thing: time I often wasted on video games and Star Wars forums and the like. (None of those are bad, but in retrospect, they were worth much less than the other things I could have been doing.) I availed myself of that music library only a handful of times, when required to for an assignment. I coasted through music theory classes on the fact that I was smart, and I got through my ear training work just fine, but “got through” is the right phrasing.

These days, I wish more than I can say that I had instead worked hard at theory and internalized it deeply, worked hard at ear training so I could readily put it to work, worked hard at analysis and understanding the scores of the greats so I could lean on that knowledge today.² I can still study today: IMSLP exists, and for that matter so does nkoda; ear training at my piano is perfectly possible; working through Open Music Theory is free and very helpful. I do that work now. But I am, these days, not a full time student, nor a single man with nearly boundless energy as I was in my late teens and early twenties. I work full time, am a husband and the father of two wonderful but also very tiring pre-teen girls, and have rather less energy than I did 15–20 years ago. Even more than that, learning is like compound interest: had I put in that work decades ago, it would have yielded far greater returns now, and therefore I would have had more to build on for the next decade.

I cannot go back in time. I can only do the work and do it well now. But I do wish, sometimes, I could send myself this note from the future as a memo: “Hey, I know playing Halo and Mass Effect and moderating forums are fun, but I promise you will be happier and more satisfied if you cut that time in half and go make a better student and musician of yourself.” I might even add some notes about exercise and sartorial choices while I was at it. But mostly I wish I had worked harder then—had known how much harder I could work and then had done it.

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🎵 Other notes

This month, three links:

• My favorite album of the past month is Letters for the Future by Time for Three, featuring Contact by Kevin Puts and Concerto 4-3 by Jennifer Higdon. Puts became a favorite of mine after I discovered his marimba concerto a few years ago, and Contact is no exception. It is also, I think, fairly approachable even among his works, which are not generally exceptionally challenging. My 12-year-old daughter said it reminded here in several places of John Williams, and I agreed. Higdon, meanwhile is a composer I appreciate even if I rarely actively enjoy her works. (See also my Free Espresso essay in the September issue!) This one, to my delight, is challenging at times but also did delight me at times.

• My wife Jaimie³ published a lovely poem earlier this week, Reflection on Loss. Give it a read!

• Barron Ryan is still on tour, so you can hear him in March or April if you live in driving distance of:

  - Sistersville, West Virginia (March 11) - Columbia, Tennessee (March 13) - Omaha, Nebraska (April 3) - Oak Creek Wisconsin (May 18)

  (Now we just need to figure out how to get Barron to do Western States Tour.)

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🎤 Links, updates, &c.

Some of you may recall that last year, I wrote a Sanctus for the season of Epiphany.⁴ Back in January, we recorded our choir and congregation singing it, and earlier this month I put up that recording. I put up a dedicated page on my music website with an absolutely-no-professionals-involved recording. I am sharing this rather unpolished recording because I think the work itself is good and I want to normalize hearing the sound of normal churches full of normal people singing gustily. It’s a good sound! It’s not the well-produced, very professional sound to which we’re accustomed, but it’s a good sound. (More on this theme sometime soon.)

Here’s that recording:

For your convenience, should you care: the links for all the other major services (if you use one that isn’t on the list, it probably has it too: DistroKid sends it everywhere):

Buy:

• Bandcamp
• iTunes

Stream:

• Amazon Music
• Apple Music
• Pandora
• Soundcloud
• Spotify
• Tidal
• YouTube Music

(If you delete this email, don’t worry: the website has all of those!)

This particular work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, i.e., the “do literally whatever you want with this, no permission required, as long as you credit me” license. I expect to license most (perhaps all!) of the church music I write this way, because the whole point is to serve the church with it! If you end up using it, do also let me know: it would be quite encouraging. (Maybe we need a “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-AndAlsoTellMe” variant! CC-BY-SA-TM!)

Accordingly, my webpage for it also includes all the music for it: full score, choir, piano, lead sheet, chords, the Dorico file—everything! Let me know if there’s some other format you’d like; I can probably add it without too much trouble.

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I spent the rest of the month working on practice—for all the reasons outlined in the essay at the top! I have started posting short videos reflecting on that process and on composing in general as YouTube Shorts and Instagram and Facebook Reels.⁵ If you’re a regular user of those social media platforms, do me a favor and subscribe, and when you see one of those pieces come through, “like” it. The reason everyone says “it helps people find the channel!” is… because it does. (Do I like this? No. Is algorithmic “content” something about which I have many opinions? Yes. Is that for another issue? Also yes.) So: no direct progress to report on the symphony, but that was intentional. I could tell I needed to practice these things, and I could also tell that I needed to let up a bit on the symphony while not letting up on my dedication to working hard at music day in and day out.

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👋🏼 Happy February!

Thank you, as always, for reading and listening! I’ll be back with another one of these in late March, probably with one of those subjects I have been promising to get to “anon”, and who knows: maybe with some music to share.

A tiny little bonus for those of you who made it all the way to the end—one of the little bits of practicing I’ve been doing nearly every morning yielded a more interesting melody than I have historically written, and I did a tiny bit of work this evening to see how it would sound with a little bit of counterpoint: listen here. Is that going to shake the world? Hardly. Is it a good bit of development in terms of a melody I can come up with in 20 minutes that is actually interesting and not just one more variation on the same thematic ideas I’ve been throwing around for 25 years? Yes. Yes, it is.