🎼 July 2025: Staying the Course
Midway through summer—and midway through the symphony: a slog. And so, staying the course. Also: Peter Boyer and Rachel Podger!
Good day, everyone! We are midway through summer, and it feels like it. Hot days, afternoon thunderstorms, and the noise of children running about (and sometimes amok) in our home. It is, also, a good season for steady, measured progress. No huge announcements: just staying the course.
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—as well as a software engineer, theologian, runner, and all-around nerd.
🎼 On the craft
You can watch a video version of this on YouTube. (Don’t worry if you don’t see a normal thumbnail below: it’s just a minor hiccup with my newsletter provider, but the video is indeed live!)
I’ve been thinking lately about staying the course on big projects. One of the real challenges with any large project, from what I can tell, is the temptation, when you get into the middle of it, to go work on something else that is faster or more readily rewarding or easier or simply novel.
Over the years, I have started a fair number of software projects which never went anywhere in the end. Starting a project is fun and exciting and interesting and novel. There are so many possibilities to explore! Finishing a project is exciting, too, because you get that nice sense of completion, of having done something. The slog in the middle?—not so much. Even when you enjoy the work, it can still be a slog. It takes enormous energy and drive to keep working at, to keep pushing day after day at, to keep steadily chipping away at.
Way back in the early 2010s, as I watched my wife write her first novel, I saw her work through exactly that challenge. Starting the book was fun, finishing the book was fun, but the work in the middle—even though she enjoyed it—, was much harder. From talking to many artists working across many different arts over the years, this is not just common but the norm. In some sense, it actually norms what it is to make a significant work: there is a slog in the middle, and you must endure. More than that, it is the norm for all kinds of “making”, as I put it in The Work is the Work last month.
That’s where I am on the symphony. I keep finding myself tempted to go work on other projects instead—because, well, I’m in the slog in the middle. I'm still enjoying it. I'm really happy with the work I've done over the course of the past month, now that I have gotten my feet back under me with this project. But it is still hard, here in the middle of it. Two-thirds of the way through a draft of Mvt. III, and then all the work to do for further revisions on Mvts. I, II, and III, and to take Mvt. IV from some good opening material and make something appropriately conclusive out of it, and then further revisions to make the whole work cohere. I will probably enjoy most of the doing of it, but there is a lot still to do.
I mentioned last month that Rachel Podger’s recordings of Bach’s partitas and sonatas (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) had me itching to go try my hand at that form myself. I am not letting myself, not until I finish a draft of Mvt. III. Stopping to work on other projects, even good projects like Holy Saturday or The Desert, can go one of two ways. It can be a nice little palette cleanser that re-energizes me, or it can be a distraction—an excuse to avoid the hard chipping-away-at-it kind of work required to see a big project through. I don’t regret pausing and working on either of those two pieces. I’m really proud of them. I am, however, restraining myself from going and swinging at another piece like that for now.
If I do, I will just take that much longer to get through this first draft, and right now the desire to go after a violin sonata is as much about wanting to step away from the slog in the middle as it is about interest in that form for its own sake. Will I go do something in that form after I get through this draft? Probably. It will be a good palate cleanser at that point. What it cannot be, however, is an excuse not to keep at the work that I have set myself: an excuse not to keep making slow but steady progress on this thing: an excuse that would be all too easy to justify because, well, after all, I'm still making music.
Instead, I am going to stay the course.
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🎵 Other notes
Long ago, when I was working on the orchestral piece that was my “capstone” project in my undergraduate music studies, I was struggling a bit with how to bring the piece together and deliver a compelling conclusion. My composition professor pointed me to the works of Peter Boyer, particularly his Ellis Island: The Dream of America. The recommendation had the intended effect of getting me unstucking, and it also gave me an enduring affection for Boyer’s music. I’m here to recommend that very piece, which I still return to regularly, 17 years after Dr. Lamb recommended it to me. Driving home from the airport at 3:30am after the worst travel day early this month, I put on Ellis Island to give myself something to attend to so I could stay awake—and stay awake I did.
Boyer’s work came to mind in part because I recently read Keiran Healy's beautiful and very moving reflection on his having become an American citizen. This country has many problems, and always has—fallen people as we are who make it up. The “Dream of America” (as the subtitle of Boyer's piece has it), though, is still a good and beautiful dream. And this piece captures it very well.
Find 45 minutes and sit down with a good pair of headphones and give it a listen.
🎤 Links, updates, &c.
One way of describing my progress on the symphony is in the very simple terms of “how long is it now?” At the end of June, my mockup of Mvt. III was 7 minutes and 16 seconds long.1 Now, it is 7 minutes and 34 seconds long. Another way of measuring it: at the end of June, Mvt. III had 242 bars of music, of which 238 were mostly orchestrated. Here at the end of July, Mvt. III has 251 bars, of which 246 are fully orchestrated.
That is not a big jump, either way of counting it! However, the main thing is that I didn’t stop—indeed, that I sustained the momentum I started building back up in June.
More importantly, the progress represents important musical development. In just the past couple of days, I have written the first bars that turn toward the conclusion of Mvt. III. At my current rate of progress, it probably will take me most of the rest of the year to finish it, but
👋🏼 Happy July!
As always, thanks for reading and supporting my work. I’ll be back at the end of August with another issue, and hopefully a great deal more of Mvt. III written!
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For various reasons, the total duration hadn’t changed since January until this month—mostly a matter of orchestration and revision! ↩
RACHEL PODGER?! She is my favorite performer of the music of the Baroque era. She's an amazing musician who plays the music with incredible scholarly knowledge but more importantly, she breathes life into every note! I listen to her CD of the Bach Partitas and Sonatas regularly and with joy. So good!
If you write a violin sonata, I want to learn to play it!
Yes! Her musicality is delightful—I’m only sad I hadn’t come across her work sooner. And of course I’d be very happy to share if I ever do write a violin sonata!