July 31, 2024

🎼 July 2024: Respite

On forced breathers and getting-back-into-it; and Pēteris Vasks’ Oboe Concerto, Vēstījums, and Lauda.

Hello!

I am Chris Krycho, a working composer (among other things—that will be a theme of this letter), and this is my monthly¹ music update.

If someone forwarded you this email, it’s clearly because they have great taste in composers and in friends, so read on—and maybe even subscribe!

🎼 On the craft

Last month, I came to this newsletter full of the kind of joy that only comes from having done things. In my actually-pays-the-bills software career,² we talk about how good it feels to ship something—to take something you made and get it out into the world, see what people make of it. At the end of June, I had not done that exactly, but I had finished a really large section of a long-running project, and taken a major step toward “shipping” it.

In July, I wrote zero music. Literally: not one note.

There are plenty of reasons for that, of course: travel, my ongoing efforts to land my next full-time job in software, extra family engagements, and so on. I spent considerable time a few days ago taking stock of all the things I have done this month, all the things I would like to do and have not. They are many and myriad. Some of them were both important and urgent, pressing in ways I could not ignore.

It does not change the fact of the matter. Zero notes is zero notes.

That is not necessarily a bad thing.

It could be, if August is another month of zero notes. When one month becomes three, and three months becomes a year, that is a bad place to be, at least for something you care about doing.

Respite, even when it is forced on us, can be a good thing, though. An athlete who recovers from a race (or an injury!) by resting is not doing something bad or wrong. I have often needed a bit of a hiatus after accomplishing some major task. This is a normal part of the ebb and flow of work. That was not my intent for this month, but my hope is that it will have served a similar purpose even so.

The question is whether we let it have its good effect on us, not least by getting back to work when the time of respite should come to an end. And so in August I plan to pick up my pen again, as it were,³ and get pushing on that next big section. Maybe get a couple people together and record something I wrote last year for them, so I can “ship” again and keep up the momentum.

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🎵 Other notes

I was mulling on what to share for your listening this month, and while a pg.lost recommendation would accurately reflect how I spent a lot of my month listening-wise as I hammered away at various software projects, I ultimately decided instead to share and recommend the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Pēteris Vasks’ Oboe Concerto, Vēstījums, and Lauda.

Vasks is not an indie composer, but a man with a long and now-well-regarded composer: but he is not especially well-known, and deserves to be far better known. Like the far-better-known Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, he spent the first decades of his career under Communist rule; also like Pärt his work is eminently beautiful and listenable; unlike Pärt his work is not consistently minimalist.⁴

I have been steadily listening through different parts of Vasks’ oeuvre over the past few years, since discovering him while looking for examples of viola concertos. (Yes, Vasks is one of the very few composers to have written a viola concerto. Whether his is “successful” who can say: viola concertos simply do not get much play. But it is worth your time!)

Why, of all the many recordings I might have chosen, the one I have chosen? In part because it is the one I have spent the most time with recently; in part because it shows his considerable range; in part because of the sheer overwhelming beauty of Lauda in particular, which is easily one of my favorite pieces of classical music from the latter 20th century. It warrants sitting down with a good pair of headphones or a good speaker system and listening to it, not merely hearing it.

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👋🏼 Happy July!

Thanks for reading. I would love to hear from you: What are things you find encouraging and helpful as you "get back to work" after some kind of respite?