🎼 June 2024: Revising!
Good art always happens by way of not just doing the work, but doing it over and over and over again until it is right.
Hello!
I am Chris Krycho, a working composer (among other things), and this is my monthly(ish) music update. I have revised this email a few times, and if it were as important to me as the other things I talk about in this issue I would revise it a few more. It is ready enough, though, so here it is, in your inbox.
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
I have had revision on my mind all month. It has been the theme of much of my composing work this month, and I was also thinking about it as I put together the first of three or four videos of background material on Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight: “I almost gave up”.
The little piano sketches I started with, the full first draft of the work, and then the final version I recorded were… different, to say the least. (If you want the full blow-by-blow on that revision process, you can see the series on my blog that I wrote as I went!)
The thing I was thinking about is very simple: if I had stuck with that first idea, it would have been a much less interesting piece in the end. The ideas I had were good, but not great. I had no idea how they fit together, or how they might develop. The second one was, frankly, a little too much Star Trek! It took until four days along working on the piece that before I was able to really get the second part of (see this post for some details on that). Four days! That’s how it works, though.
The same kind of thing was at play this month as I worked on the large orchestral piece that is my main musical project at present. My goal for the month was to finish one of the movements in the work. I did! But only by way of lots of revision.
For my first pass, back in late May, I had an idea for how that section (and the movement of which is a part) should work structurally. I tried it. It simply did not work. I initially thought the idea itself was a non-starter and abandoned it, going for a totally different structure. I finished a draft (albeit with a bit of orchestration yet to do) back on June 7th. But as I kept listening to it, I was not satisfied. Everything there was good, but there wasn’t enough there. For my third pass, I went back to that first idea and tried it again—keeping the core musical idea, but making big changes to it tonally. Third time the charm; it worked. It still needed (and needs) further orchestration work and more revision—but it worked at a fundamental level.
This is, I believe, how art-making always is. I wrote last time about Tolkien’s 18-year effort to write The Lord of the Rings: a big part of that was starting over on whole large sections again, and again, and again, and again. Revision is hard. Harder, in some ways than starting, and starting can be incredibly daunting. Revising means taking something you already did, possibly something you think is good, something you are proud of, and changing it. Sometimes revision means scrapping whole chunks of something you worked hard on. That is as true of writing as composing; watching visual artists and actors work, I see the same there.
The process of revision can also be deeply satisfying, though. There is something exhilarating—I use that word carefully!—about taking something that was fine, or even something that was good, and shaping it to be richer, clearer, sharper, finer, lovelier in the truest sense.
🎵 Other notes
A couple months ago I came across Carlos Simon via a recording of The Block. He’s an excellent contemporary composer, well-known enough that there is a decent chance you might already have heard of him. If not, give him a listen. The Block and other similarly joyful orchestral works are very much in the neo-romantic/post-film space I enjoy, with a deep infusion from the gospel and jazz traditions.
In a very different vein, his Requiem for the Enslaved was commissioned by the university where Simon is a professor of composition as a tribute to the 272 people the university sold to pay its debts, and is worth a serious listen. “Serious”, I say, because it is a heavy work. I struggle not to weep, listening to some of it. The text and the music alike are appropriately raw responses to that horror.
In previous issues, I mentioned my friend Barron Ryan’s There Arises Light Kickstarter project, a trio for piano, violin, and cello, commemorating the centenary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. The public release was early this month! You can snag it here, and while you can get it for free, you should pay for it. (Support artists making beautiful things in the world!)
🎤 Links, updates, &c.
I am happy to have more to share here this month!
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As I noted above, I published the first of what I expect to be 3–4 videos exploring the process behind writing and recording my Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight. The process of writing and recording that work spanned 2020–2023! Nearly all of that was new to me—even the composing bits I had done before had some new-to-me things, and not only in taking revision seriously. I cover some of that in this first episode, and will cover more! Give it a watch, let me know what you think, and tell me what you would like to hear about in Part 2!
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Finishing that movement of the large orchestral work was one of my goals for all of 2024, so getting there in June felt great. This is roughly the halfway point for drafting this piece, and I have high hopes that I will meet my big goal of finishing the thing as a whole by the time I am 40 (3 years hence). At this rate, I might even do it by the time I am 39.
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I have been making a point to post smaller updates to social media, including some tiny bits of behind the scenes work on the major orchestra work I am still chipping away at. (Not enough to spoil anything, though!) I will continue experimenting that way. You can if you follow me on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, or Twitter. Let me know what you’d like to see is and is not working!
👋🏼 Happy June!
I hope your summer is going well so far. Lord willing I will get a lot done in July, since I will have one week where I should be able to devote considerably more time than usual to side projects. I suppose the next issue will tell!