Hello!

I am Chris Krycho, a working composer (among other things), and this is my monthly(ish) music update. We come now nearly to the end of the Year of Our Lord 2024, and I am ready to tell you just a little bit about the musical project that has occupied me since 2021.

🎼 On the craft

I have an idea that I cannot get out of my head: What would a score for Robin Sloan’s Moonbound sound like? And for that matter: for each of the books in the greater Penumbraverse? I don’t have time to compose that music, but I cannot stop thinking about it. Someone ought to do it.

This is adjacent to another long-standing “problem” I have of much the same sort: I have long wanted to try my hand at composing an interpretation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Ainulindalë”—the creation myth that opens The Silmarillion, and one of my favorite pieces of literature. I would not be the first composer to take it on, but then many great pieces of art have more than one musical interpretation. Indeed: one sign that a given work of art—pictorial, literary, sculptural, etc.—is truly great art is that it generates other art.

In both of these cases, I do not presently have time to take on the scale of the task. I also feel, though, that I do not yet have the skill to take on the task. I am pushing at the bounds of what I am capable of to write a symphony I am actually proud of; but even that has a great deal of what I think of as “first novel energy”: just getting the words on the page and revising it into coherence is famously an incredibly challenging task for a would-be novelist. The same is true of a symphony.

Yes, a symphony.

I am outing it here at last, because I am far enough along that I am no longer worried I will not finish it: the “large orchestral work” I have been slowly carving out of the æther these past few years is my first symphony. I will keep most of the rest of the details close to my chest for fear of spoiling the work, but this is what occupies the 20–30 minute blocks each morning, what the occasional 8-hour stretch on a Saturday is about, what I have been dreaming of having performed by a real-live orchestra someday, what will be unaffordable to record the way I did my fanfare a few years ago because the symphony is (no surprise) already 10× the length of that fanfare, what I know not how I will get “into the world”—but what I am committed to do my best to do just that.

It is one thing to pause briefly, to cleanse the palette with a short solo work or a congregational song. It would be something else entirely to pivot over to working on music for Sloan’s Penumbraverse, or especially on an orchestral (and perhaps choral) treatment of Ainulindalë. I did not actually say what this project was for so long because I have long found myself a starter but not a finisher of projects: and publicizing them did not help with that; it only made me sad and sometimes a little ashamed when I set the project aside, even if for very good reasons.

So: a symphony. I will likely finish and record a few more of those smaller works along the way; but the symphony comes first, before any other large works, no matter how many other interesting ideas I have. It matters to me that I finish it, that I not get stuck in “first symphony” mode. And if someday I do then try to pick up the task of writing music suitable to someone else’s works, perhaps I will be at least a little better able to do it justice.

For now, though: with 29 minutes written and somewhere on the order of another 8–12 to go (…I think?), the goal is to keep up those 20–30-minute stretches every day and thus keep making substantive progress month in and month out, until I have a first draft of the symphony. Then revise, and revise, and revise some more. Then… we will see. I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

✍️ Subscribe

If this is your first time reading this email, can I encourage you to subscribe? Or, if you’re a long-term subscriber, to share it with a friend? There are not all that many of you, and—to hit a theme I will come back to in a future issue at length—this kind of work can be quite lonely at times! Seeing people “come along for the ride” helps.

🎵 Other notes

I am always looking for contemporary composers to add to my overall listening repertoire. I have one to share with you today, but first, with an eye toward December and the close of the year—

Call for submissions

Who are your favorite contemporary composers of orchestral or choral music? What are your favorite works of theirs? I will listen to every recommendation you send me and include them in the December issue of this newsletter!

My recommendation this month

Earlier this year I discovered British composer and orchestrator Dani Howard. Cue delight from my daughters at the announcement of another female composer: I am always sharing female composers with them, and they are always excited. It is delightful to see the field of composing—still too slowly—changing and welcoming women’s voices.

I have returned to Howard’s Orchestral Works recording repeatedly since discovering it: it shimmers. As much as she writes some good melodies and harmonies (and she does), the thing I come back to over and over again when listening to her music is how it works as texture: gorgeous orchestration and the sense of the orchestra as an instrument.

Bonus: I don’t know how large the trombone concerto repertoire is, but her Orchestral Works album includes another wonderful one.

🎤 Links, updates, &c.

Earlier this week, I finally crossed the mark where people have played my Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight over 100× total on Music. That’s not a lot, in some ways—but it’s absolutely a lot to me! Thanks to all of you who have listened to it, on whatever service, in whatever way.

👋🏼 Happy November!

I am, once again, hitting “Send” on this when it is still November for me, but I know for many of you it is already December. I look forward to reporting, four weeks hence, on where all I have gotten musically by the end of this year. I hope you have a wonderful month, and that it does not involve too many terrible “Christmas” songs. Thank you, as always, for reading!