May 31, 2024

🎼 May 2024: Musical Development (…but not that kind)

On artistic endeavors that take many long years to complete (with, of course, a nod to Tolkien), some comments from readers, and a recommendation: Ryan Keebaugh!

Hello!

I am Chris Krycho, a working composer (among other things), and this is my monthly(ish) music update. I send it to you at the… turn of the tide? No, that is Gandalf the White. Turn of the month. As I prepare to send this, I am sitting at my desk for an evening of composing, with the most beautiful late spring weather—the clear sky after rain—out my window. It is the end of May, and I have things to share (and reasons for having Gandalf on my mind).

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!

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🎼 On the craft

For the past 3 years, I have been steadily plugging away on a major orchestral work. I am: not ready to talk about it! Over the past few years, I have grown a (healthy, I think) fear of saying too much about big projects in public before they are well and truly coming to fruition: too many software projects announced and then tabled long before they were done. However, I may drop in here the occasional update on how this work and others are going, without getting into too much detail and so giving away the game.¹ For example:

I noticed something this big orchestral project has in common with any sufficiently large artistic endeavor: the effect time’s passing has on the shape and content of the work.

Taking this long to write a piece means I am a substantially better composer and (perhaps especially!) orchestrator than I was when I started on this project back in 2021. And this has the odd effect that I am going to have to do a lot of revision on the thing as a whole to make it fit well together. There are things about this which could work out all right in terms of the way the piece progresses, but it will still need what I can only think of as a kind of smoothing so that each part feels like it belongs with the rest, rather than being incoherent as a whole. The longer the process of creation stretches out, the more this dynamic comes into play.

I sometimes think about The Lord of the Rings in connection with this kind of work. Tolkien took twelve years to write the novel, including a long break during what he describes² as the darkest days of the second World War. It took another half decade before even the first volume was published, and it was fully 18 years from the time he started writing the first drafts until The Return of the King appeared in print. Eighteen years! And of course the novel built on decades of other writing in the imaginarium of Middle Earth, not to mention Tolkien’s professional work in philology. It is not an exaggeration to say that it took a dozen years to do the actual writing but dozens to be able to write it.

I also think on the fact that writing The Lord of the Rings was not Tolkien’s “day job” as it were: it was a side gig, secondary to his work as a professor at Oxford.

I have no hope that this orchestral piece I am writing will be one of the great artistic works of the 21^st century as Tolkien’s was of the 20^th, but I take some solace in knowing that good work can take long years of toiling away in obscurity. More than that, to return to the theme I opened with: it can come into the world in the end still bearing the marks of its long journey there. The opening chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring still bear the stamp of having been authored initially as a sequel to The Hobbit, equally light in tone and equally episodic in structure. (People often want to make some kind of literary sense of Tom Bombadil, but in the end he remains from earlier versions of the story, and the oddity he imparts to the narrative does not diminish it.) Tolkien rewrote all of that material multiple times, but the marks are still there.

Maybe, just maybe, the marks of maturation in my composing will still work when this particular thing is done. And goodness knows I hope it takes me less time than it took Tolkien to finish and publish The Lord of the Rings!

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📑 Follow-up

Last time, I wrote about what music is. A couple of you, delightfully, responded with your own insights! I am still not ready to tackle the question of representationalism (or the lack thereof) in music, but I am making some headway in my own thinking about it, in no small part because of your feedback! Some excerpts from those conversations (with permission from the folks quoted here, of course!).

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My friend Katelyn Shelton wrote, and I responded:

I once had an argument with a youth ministry assistant about whether instrumental music could be categorized as worship. I was shocked that he thought only music with lyrics could be worshipful. I still think about that conversation a lot. And perhaps that’s another question to add to your list — what makes music worshipful? Is all music worship? If not, what makes some music worshipful and other music (perhaps) profane?

The distinction between “worship” and “worshipful” might get at something important, as does the difference between “congregational worship” and “individual worship”. There is something there around the way that a lot of “all of life is worship” both gets at something incredibly important and flattens out important distinctions.

And in a follow-up exchange, she wrote and I responded:

I was thinking about this conversation yesterday when I read this NYT article on Beethoven's deafness. It mentions that his Ninth Symphony (whose 200th anniversary was last week!) has what is considered to be the first instance of singing in a symphony, as part of its culmination (the Ode to Joy!). When I think of worshipful music it's hard to get more worshipful and jubilant than the Ode to Joy. And in listening to it this morning, it made me wonder again about instrumental music versus music with lyrics/singing, and I thought it interesting that as Beethoven moves from depression to a search for joy to the culmination of joy in his Ninth, he moves from purely instrumental to instrument plus choir. Wonder what Beethoven would have thought of the debate? Is singing more worshipful than purely instrumental music? Are both equally worshipful (or can they be)? Why did he choose to end his Ninth Symphony with a choir when no one else had ever done such a thing in a symphony?

This is directly related to one of the key themes in musicology more generally: people generally respond most strongly at an emotional/immediate response level to instrumental music when it does the kinds of things human voices do. This is why people love John Williams! It’s also why a lot of the more sophisticated/intellectual music can be harder for people to approach: it is often much less like what a human voice might sing.

So I don’t know that it’s so much related to worship specifically as it is to the way that we respond emotionally to vocal music in general!

To pick up on that last thread a bit, there is a typical move among young, art-forward Christians to say “Everything is worship.” I would know, because I made this claim, once upon a time. I no longer do! I think the distinction I drew in my response is an important one, between ‘worship’ per se and things which are ‘worshipful’, i.e. done with the aim to glorify God in the doing. We might say the same of ‘art’ and ‘artistic’; things may be done artistically which are not art.

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My friend Eric Dorbin (who along with his wife kindly hosted me overnight before the half marathon I ran on the 19th) also shared some thoughts on the subject:³

I was pondering edge cases… Specifically, I was thinking about music like percussion that doesn’t rely (much) on notes and how it could be perceived by even someone deaf. I would still probably consider that music, and it starts to get into the question: what is structured sound? Which, you didn’t necessarily dive into in your last newsletter.

Since then, that also got me thinking about things like water/sand vibrated by sound or tones that could be observed with a visual rhythm, or something like a light and/or show laser show, kinda like the concert in Mr Holland’s Opus. Somewhere it probably stops necessarily being “music” and becomes more of a visual or performance art, but the line is a bit fuzzy in my mind. That’s okay with me though since it’s all art, and the value of that is entirely determined by that “processed/interpreted by a human” part of the equation, which will always be subjective at least in part.

This was a really interesting point! As we were chatting before the race, “sound” is itself somewhat hard to define. If we define it as vibrations, regardless of the medium through which it is transmitted or perceived, then someone deaf could still perceive it.⁴ That morning, I suggested it would still count as music in that sense, but I am no longer sure, because I think defining sound that way is not quite right. Sound per se relates to hearing specifically, and there are vibrations we could feel but not hear. This is the old “if a tree falls in a forest…” puzzle, and I take the answer to be no: there are vibrations but no noise—no sound—per se.

As for the reference to visual and performance art, this is exactly what I was getting at in my note about John Cage’s 4′33″ in the last issue of the newsletter: those parts of the work are themselves not music, but they may well be very interesting art, and different forms of art can complement each other!

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If you keep sending me feedback like this, I may just have to up the frequency and publish a mid-month missive which is all about the interactions with readers! (A good thing, so take it as a challenge!)

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🎵 Other notes

I stumbled across Ryan Keebaugh’s work somewhere online—Threads, maybe?—back in April, and found his particular approach to “sacred minimalism” really beautiful and inspiring. One of the things I would like to do over the course of June is listen to as many of the rest of his works as are available. I have also enjoyed following him on social media; you can find him on Instagram and Threads. I commend his work to you!

Who have you discovered lately in the contemporary composing space?

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🎤 Links, updates, &c.

A dozen years ago, I wrote a blog post/essay on similar themes to today’s essay: And the stew tastes good. All these years later, I think it holds up!

I have, alas, no more contemporary links to share this month, though I will tease that if you keep your eye on my music-focused YouTube channel, you will hopefully see the first of a series of videos in a Sketch to Studio series, exploring the process of composing, recording, and publishing my Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight over the span of May 2020–March 2023.

I had hoped to publish the first of those videos this month, but alas

This month was a bit slower than last month on the music front for a couple reasons:

• There was no incredible aerial silks performance of a piece I wrote to start off the month. (If you missed it last month, this is what I am talking about!)
• I spent the first chunk of the month preparing for and then delivering two (!) 50-minute (!) talks at a software conference. That in turn ate into a bunch of time I might have had the rest of the month for music-related endeavors, since I needed to catch back up on work which actually pays the bills. (Someday, maybe, music will contribute meaningfully to that, but it definitely does not today!)

Given a choice between the meta-work of promoting my music and the work of actually composing, I choose composing, and it is important that I do so. Building an audience is well and good, but the audience needs something to listen to!

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👋🏼 Happy May!

Thank you not only for reading but for responding. Hearing from you is a great encouragement as I keep working on this large-scale piece, and as I do the work to try to build an audience for my works.

On which note: if you liked this, would you send it along to someone else might enjoy it as well?—and the same with my music?

See you (as it were) in June!