May 31, 2025

🎼 May 2025: What’s in a Title?

Titles do a lot of interpretive work for instrumental music—and other art, for that matter. Also: Thad Corea, Matthew Clark, and updates!

Hello, all! I write this missive to you in a mix of beach chairs and aircraft as well as my normal spot on a couch: my family and I spent a week at the beach with my grandparents, my parents, and one of my aunts and uncles and their adult children (my cousins). It was lovely! I didn’t do a lot that was productive, though I did briefly show off Dorico to the uncle and cousin who also work with music in various ways.

If you’re new to this party: I’m Chris Krycho, a composer working in the contemporary classical world. You can read more about that here. This is my monthly music missive on the things I have been thinking about in my work as a composer, for May 2025.

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🎼 On the craft

What’s in a title? In April, I released a new short work: Holy Saturday, and listening to it afterward I was reflecting on that question. As I noted back in March’s issue, instrumental music does not and indeed cannot directly represent the ideas to which it is tied:

Representation in art is never a simple thing, and with music, and especially instrumental music, it must be indirect. It conveys those emotions, but it cannot convey, really, more than those emotions. It can transport you, it can leave you with a sense of wonder or sorrow, delight or distress, but it does so always only by suggestion.

Holy Saturday, for example, may manage to convey a sense of waiting, of time ticking ever-so-slowly. It does not intrinsically convey any connection from that feeling to the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, though. Many moments in life could produce a similar feeling. Waiting for news that you know not whether to dread or hope. Waiting with a loved one as they die. Waiting a judge’s decision in an important court case.¹ But put a title on the work and suddenly it conveys something much more specific. Without changing the music itself a bit, our reception of it, perhaps even our perception of it, changes. Suddenly it is a reflection on a specific moment in history, with a particular kind of resonance for people who follow a given religion.

The same applies to every piece of “programmatic” instrumental music. Respighi’s The Pines of Rome would be a striking and obviously programmatic work regardless, but would it make you think of Rome specifically without that title? No. Or consider a work like Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”. Even as the symphony hints at its origins by musical allusions, the subtitle makes it American in a way that the music alone does not. That goes double today when most of the allusions are lost on us!

Or again: Holst’s The Planets has some famous and striking moments, but those bits in “Mars” that classical music listeners now so strongly associate with the bringer of war do not inherently mean anything about Mars or the Roman god. For good or for ill, most modern listeners are likelier to associate large swaths of that work with Star Wars due to Lucas’ use of it as a temp track and Williams’ following it quite closely! So far as we think of Holst’s work as being related to Mars, it is because, and only because of the title.

This goes, mutatis mutandis, for other forms of art, too. A poem or even a novel can use its title to entirely reframe its contents, despite being verbal media. Likewise for a painting—even one with a concrete subject, but far more so abstract paintings, where the the title may lead us to interpretations and indeed literally to see things we otherwise would not.

A title, in other sum, does a surprisingly large amount of work in shaping our interpretation and understanding of a work of art.

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What works of art—music, poetry, painting, literature—have you experienced this with? You can reply in two ways:

1. Just hit reply in your inbox!
2. Leave a comment!

That’s right: starting with this issue (though it applies to old issues, too), I have done something truly wild and turned on the comments section. We’ll see whether it proves worth it, but I think it’s a good experiment. You can let me know what you think about that, too!

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🎵 Other notes

The aforementioned uncle is Thaddeus Corea.² He’s been encouraging my work on musical things since I was in high school, and I started poking at hiring an orchestra to record Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight in part because of his suggestion. If any of you happen to be in need of music production, mixing, etc.—or know someone who does—, he’s good at it, so check out his Jaguar Recording Studio.

That also puts me in mind of my acquaintance Matthew Clark, a musician and author who has ended up connected with our church and the arts society adjacent to it, because Matthew was the other half of the reason I ended up recording that fanfare with the Budapest Scoring Orchestra! He’s worth giving a listen and perhaps a read!

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🎤 Links, updates, &c.

This month was not a zero progress kind of month, but it was a low-progress kind of month. Between getting Holy Saturday out the door in April just two days before starting a new job, trying to find my feet in that new job, giving the opening keynote at a tech conference in mid-May, running my first marathon just a week later, and then this beach trip: I have been busy.

So I did a little music. The main things I did were light editorial and revision work on the symphony—some guided by Dorico 6’s new proofreading feature, and some guided by my own two ears.

You may have noticed that I never got to the video version of last month’s essay. All the same reasons!

I’m really looking forward to getting back into my normal groove: 20–30 minutes a day, every work day, as we come here into June! I also expect to record video versions of the April and May essays, and I’ll make sure to link back to them in June’s issue in case you’d like to see them.

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👋🏼 Happy May!

Thanks for reading, and for listening, and if you brave the comments section, for commenting! Do tell me about works whose titles have informed your understanding!