🎼 January 2025: Always Ambitious, Joy Undimmed
Why do we make art? How do we fight off the discouragement of knowing our work will never stand alongside the greatest of the greats? How do we hold onto the joy of the thing?
Hello!
I am Chris Krycho. Today is January 31, 2025, and I am astonished that we are already a twelfth of the way through the year. This is my monthly composing newsletter, in which I document the process of writing contemporary music and write about the artistic process more generally. focused this month on inspiration in the composing process, including my ups and downs as a composer fitting in the work alongside a full-time career in software, publishing music in the shifting world of the first half of the twenty-first century, and more. Welcome!
🎼 On the craft
I.
A few weeks ago, I listened to The Rest is History’s excellent pair of episodes on Mozart and Beethoven, and it mashed a little button in me that I also have mashed basically every time we go to the orchestra: Why in the world do I bother composing? I will never, ever write something half as good as this.
That is a foolish way of thinking about art, of course. As well to say you should not bother writing a novel because it is unlikely you will be the next Austen or Tolkien. As well to say one should not bother painting because you will not be a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh. By definition, the greatest artists in the world are few, and most of us will certainly not be among their number.
Why, then, is that pernicious comparison so easy? Some of it, no doubt, is simply ego. All of us want to be great. I remember dreaming, as a young man in high school looking forward to studying physics in college, of being the one to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. I have dreamed for many years of my music being heard and loved, of its being good enough to enter the repertoire.
That last line suggests the tension we all experience when it comes to ambition. It is not wrong or bad to desire to make something lovely, or to desire that the lovely thing one has made be appreciated. It is not even a bad thing per se to strive to make something great and good—something so good that people for generations will continue to enjoy it. We all, I think, want something of ourselves to endure. We have a longing for eternity.
But the stories of Mozart and Beethoven also have something to tell us about these dreams. Their personal narratives stand in those years we crossed into musical modernity, the time when “genius” was first in the air, when “fans” (fanatics!) first came into existence, when we hallowed the work of the artist in a new way, when we began to think it a shame that Bach spent all those years an employee with a great many specific musical responsibilities every week.
The pressure created by those transitions has never left us. The fact that orchestra concerts (much as I do love them in their current form) are special occasions, things we go to once in a month, or twice if we are lucky, signals something about the role music takes in our culture and our lives. On the one hand: something glorious, celebrating the greatest music of the ages. On the other, something that makes it all too easy to feel that if our music cannot stand beside the greatest music of the ages, it is not worth hearing, perhaps not even worth writing.
I reject that thought, every time. But it niggles, even so. And it is not without cause. If my music is not good enough to stand alongside the greats in a concert hall—note that I do not say “as good as theirs” but “good enough to stand alongside them”—how will it ever get played? This is the other half of the story: the ambition to make art that is actually good, good enough to be played and enjoyed by others. After all, if music does not get played, what is the point? Yes, it brings me joy to write, but that joy is partly proleptic, anticipatory, hopeful. It is grounded in no small part in the hope that others, too, will truly enjoy this thing into which I have poured so many hours of my life.
II.
The first Saturday of January, just after wrapping up breakfast, I had the urge to walk over to my piano and sketch an idea for a little musical theme. On the moment the urge took me, I had no particular idea in mind. I was certainly not thinking of a tune. I was not consciously thinking of anything, really. The moment I opened the keyboard of the piano and set my fingers on the keys, though, a little melody popped out: fully formed as an idea immediately.
I played it, decided I liked it, played it again to fix it in my mind, then bolted to the other room to grab my iPad and notate it down in Dorico before it got away from me. Three minutes later, I had done just that.
This sort of experience is what we name “inspiration”, I think. It is not, in its own right, sufficient to create a good piece of art—even if I also think most great art has at least a dash of this in it. What caught my attention as I reflected on the process was that some part of me did have the idea. I wanted to go to the piano just then, though I could not have told you why. I knew at some level that I had a musical idea, though I could not have hummed it. It was “subconscious”—perhaps pre-conscious.
It is not always this way. Sometimes a musical idea will first rise to the level of consciousness, and then I will try to write it out, whether with piano, paper, and pencil or with Dorico and a MIDI keyboard. Curiously, I am rarely successful at fully translating from my mind into notation in those attempts, but I think that is merely a matter of skill. I need to practice more!
When I do get the inexplicable, inarticulate urge to go work something out on the piano, though, I have learned to trust that feeling. Not every idea that comes this way is a keeper, but I want to at least give it a chance. The human mind is a strange and wondrous thing.
These moments, and the many 20–30-minute stretches in the dark early mornings I have spent this month working on a symphony, have none of the malaise of those moments in the orchestra or listening to a good recording of the greats. These moments are simply good. Hard work and flash of inspiration alike, they are good.
This is the first part of the answer. The work itself really is good. The joy of inspiration, the challenge of asking “Is this anything?” and deciding whether to keep the idea, to iterate on it, to make something of something that might or might not be “anything”; or to let it go and move on to the next idea, no matter how inspired it felt in the moment: those are good things themselves. They are incomplete. They are good, though. And they point to another part of the answer.
III.
Why do any of us make art? Why do I compose?
All those ideas about ambition and wanting to be known and to endure: set them aside for a moment. Ponder instead the last toddler you met. Did he wonder, “Why dance? Why color this page?” Did she wonder, “Why sing? Why make up a story for Mommy and Daddy?”
Of course not.
Life, in all its tragedy and sorrow, its brokenness and weeping, its trudging drudgery, and perhaps above all its relentless competition and comparison, teaches us—if we do not fight it every step of the way—that there must be a reason to make art, that the reason must be good enough, and that the art too must be good enough, or else it is not worth it. But this is wrong. We make art because we are to the depths of us begetters-of-beauty.
Ambition does not have to be an enemy of that joy, that beauty-begetting, any more than studying astrophysics need undercut the wonder of the night sky. Indeed: well-tuned ambition can sustain and undergird the hard work required for real excellence.
To be an adult as an artist just is, I think, to find a way to marry that instinctive love of creating for the joy of it with the pursuit of excellence: neither letting the pursuit of excellence dim the joy, nor failing ever to pursue excellence. That marriage will look different for each of us. It must. We have our own gifts (with their own limits), and not every one of us who is an artist is an artist first. Faithfulness to our other vocations may demand we make less of our art—less in quantity and less in importance both. But even so, always ambitious, with joy undimmed.
🎵 Other notes
As noted above, part of what got me thinking again about Mozart and Beethoven was listening to two wonderful episodes of the wonderful podcast The Rest is History:
- Mozart: History’s Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert HallÂ
- Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
For those of you who are huge classical music history buffs, little in those episodes will be new (as indeed little of it was new to me): but hearing the Academy of St. Martin in the Field play good music is good, and hearing Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook not only tell those men’s stories but situate them in the artistic and social and political currents of Europe in their day was fantastic.
Some pure listening recommendations (which I admit are rather all over the place this month!):
- Joseph Dall’Abaco: 11 Caprices for Violoncello solo, is a lovely recording by cellist Irena Josifoska. Both Dall’Abaco (18th–19th century composer) and Josifoska (contemporary cellist) were new to me, and I found them via a reply on social media1 when I asked earlier this month what the last album people had purchased was. I am glad of the discovery! And now I put the question to you: What album did you last purchase?
- My own answer to that question was Peter Gregson’s completed Quartets: One–Four, which is one of my favorite collections of contemporary string quartet writing.
- Explosions in the Sky scored a Netflix show, and the results were wonderful: American Primeval: Soundtrack from the Netflix Limited Series. I know nothing about the show, but very much enjoy the score. It has much the same relationship to Explosions in the Sky’s normal sound as Daft Punk’s score for Tron: Legacy—this is not the band’s normal sound, but it is recognizably the band.
- The Danish String Quartet, mentioned a few episodes ago, released a lovely album today containing many of their works: Nordic Tunes. It appears so far to be available only on streaming services, but I expect I shall buy it the day it is available in the iTunes store. It is a very good collection.
If you are enjoying this and aren’t yet subscribed, you cansubscribe via email or RSS Feed!
(Why do I put some variation on this in every issue? Because it turns out that making it easy for people to do while they’re reading makes a difference in people remembering that they would like in fact like to get the next issue of the newsletter. Anyway: back to the rest of the newsletter!)
🎤 Links, updates, &c.
I am continuing to make steady headway on the symphony. Not fast, by any stretch, but steady. At the end of December, the total running time of the Mvt. III mockup was 06:25; it is now 07:16. (The mockup of the work as a whole currently stands at 31:03.) Running time alone doesn’t tell you that much—as I put it to the CEO of the Colorado Springs Philharmonic when we met and talked music and art back in 2023, slow movements are much faster to write because they have so many fewer notes!—, but it is nonetheless an indicator that I have been making steady progress.
My goal has been to spend 100 minutes a week writing, and while some of that has gone to helping with other projects, most of it has in fact made its way into the symphony. I am so far still on track to finish this movement and do another revision pass on both it and Mvt. II (which really needs that revision pass) by the end of the year.
Next month, Lord willing, I will also have a recording of our church’s humble choir and congregation singing the Sanctus for Epiphany I wrote last year. We have been singing it these past three Sundays (and will be until Lent) and I must say: there is nothing quite like hearing the congregation belting it out, more and more confident.
👋🏼 Happy January!
Thank you for reading. If you have thoughts and comments of your own, I always love to hear them. If you particularly liked this, please share it with others!
Until February!