🎼 June 2025: The Work is the Work
Meta-work is not the work, even when it is important. Keep your eyes on the making.
Hello, dear subscribers: It is the evening of June 30th, 2025. It is storming out the window behind my office: that glorious summer afternoon or evening thunderstorm that has always shouted Colorado summer to me. More than the hot days, more even than the mountain flowers, these storms tell me it is summertime in the state where I grew up and that I call home.
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, sometime-photographer and all-around nerd.
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🎼 On the craft
This month I turned 38 years old, hurt my back (again!), and courtesy largely of the injured back managed to write only 4 bars of music, all of them this morning. But I will take those 4 bars. They’re good bars, for one thing; for another, they represent my commitment to get back to the task of composing on the regular. To do the work. To make music.
Craig Mod recently wrote, speaking of his book tour for his excellent Things Become Other Things, that it is easy to forget that all the meta-work, however much it matters, is not the work. I feel that keenly: a few weeks ago I tried to take some time to do what I theoretically ought to be doing far more regularly and post a bit to social media about my music, and that was the only thing I did that morning. Likewise, I am spending the time this evening to write this newsletter because it is good for me to publish it consistently. (You get off the horse, it is hard to get back on. I know this well from many, many previous such endeavors!) But writing this newsletter is not composing a symphony.
I see the same thing in my day job. There is a lot of meta-work to be done; it could fill up the entire day if I let it. I dare not. The meta-work is not the work. The work is making things. The phrase “making things” left by itself might suggest that it must always be an act of sub-creation, must indeed be what we think of in our culture as “creative work” or “the arts”. But “making” can be a matter of “making something better”, too: restoration and amelioration. It can be a matter of tending and sustaining: making good, homey, cozy, inviting. We regard novelty much too highly relative to these other modes of making, it is true. But the key is to let our lives be full of those many kinds of making, rather than making much of ourselves and our makings to others.
And so this month I will leave you with that and get back to the making.
🎵 Other notes
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John Powell hardly needs the boost from me (and no doubt will not notice it) but: if you enjoyed his work on the original How to Train Your Dragon, you will also enjoy his work on the live-action remake. As with the film, the score treads only a little new ground, but the new material is good.
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Apple Music lately recommended to me a nearly-20-year-old album that I have been listening to and loving and—per recent reminders!—just purchased: Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 1, by Rachel Podger. It is a glorious interpretation of Bach’s works. The kind of thing that had me thinking “I should try to write a sonata in this style!” listening to it in the car a few days ago. That is a testament to the quality of the performance and recording, as well as to Bach’s enduring genius. It also marks a bit of hoped-for growth on my part: from finding the masters overwhelming to finding them inspiring.
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I referenced Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things above. It’s a wonderful, beautiful, moving book about America, about Japan, about Craig himself, and about the beauty and possibility of life. It is not an easy read, but it was an excellent one.
🎤 Links, updates, &c.
I am, as mentioned above, back to making progress on the symphony. I have a good idea where I am taking the last section of the third movement after feeling rather stymied for a bit. I also started sketching out a brief setting of “the mystery of faith” (“Christ has died / Christ is risen / Christ will come again”) for congregational singing—still noodling on that. I like it, but it’s a bit too pat at present, and I am not yet clear whether the problem is the melody, the lack of a good harmony, or (most likely) a bit of both. I hope to make steady progress on both the symphony and that little setting in July. Hold me to it!
People interested in the things I do beyond this newsletter may find my LambdaConf 2025 keynote interesting: it is an exploration of how open-source software actually works, and hits on some perhaps-surprising themes, including infrastructure (riffing on Deb Chachra’s excellent How Infrastructure Works), anarchism (but probably not the kind you’re thinking of when you read that word), metaphysical capitalism, and more.
👋🏼 Happy June!
I hope your summer is off to an excellent start. Until July—do the work, whatever your work is, and do it well! Make good!