Happy (American) Thanksgiving, everyone! I’m grateful to be in better health than I was a month ago, to be bringing you this newsletter, to be able to participate in the making of art, and to have in you my readers and listeners a small audience that cares about my art. Truly, thank you!

In this issue:

• On music and photography and listening and looking and singing and writing well.
• Kevin Puts with a new work featuring Time for Three and Joyce DiDonato! The Mountain Goats! Brooke Fraser with an orchestra!
• Both a non-update and a happy accident in the land of streaming music.

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. If someone forwarded this to you and you like it, you can subscribe here. You can also unsubscribe any time!

🎼 On the craft

You can watch a video version of this essay here:

I.

A friend and I were recently discussing the genres of photography we enjoy looking at and taking—and how those differ from many of the people around us. My friend commented:

I think photography is in a unique position where there is “photography” and there is also “pictures of things”… and everyone is very familiar with pictures of things but a lot fewer people are familiar with photography.

The same, we noticed, applies to music and musical genres. Some art forms require more work to understand and appreciate, and even once you do understand the form it may or may not appeal to you. A pop song—even one with some musical depth or sophistication, the sort that rewards repeated listening for its layers and choices—has less going on than a piece of classical music or a jazz tune. Everyone, you might say, is familiar with music, but a lot fewer people are familiar with the kinds of music that I write (or that I write about in this newsletter). It is the same basic idea as my riff on espresso a while back.

This is not a criticism of people who just like pop music, nor of people for whom photography is just “pictures of things”. It is merely to observe that there are both significant varieties within each of these media—wedding photography and portraiture have some overlap but are not the same, and neither has much in common with landscape photography, and street photography is still different again—and that appreciation for one genre within an art form does not necessarily translate directly or cleanly to another.

This is, it turns out, just fine—but we have to be aware of it.

II.

One of my favorite sounds is the sound of normal people singing gustily. A friend recently had the opportunity to teach a group of young people to sing four part harmony for one of the classic tunes—the Old Hundredth—for the Doxology (“Praise God from whom all blessings flow / Praise him all creatures here below / Praise him above ye heavenly host / Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”). It was probably the first time in most of their lives that they got to experience the joy of that kind of communal music. When he shared the recording privately, it nearly gave me chills: “What 10 minutes of basic singing instruction and 20 minutes of learning a harmony part will do for 35 teenagers who ‘can't sing’”, as he put it, is a real delight of the sort you don’t get to experience every day. (Wouldn’t it be delightful if it were?)

That group of teenagers couldn’t leap from that to singing the kinds of pieces that professional choirs sing, or even to the kinds of things that my daughter’s middle school choir can sing after a semester of practicing. But they could sing, with gusto and with great joy, something that most of them probably thought they couldn’t sing just a few hours earlier. They also probably appreciate music set in four-part harmony a bit more than they did before, because it is now not something wholly foreign to them but something of which they have direct experience themselves. They got to taste, just a little, how it works from the inside.

I see much the same in the singing of the people around me at church: few of us have been formally trained in singing, and we have little practice or experience with “high” art forms when it comes to singing. (How many people regularly attend choral concerts or the opera? Not many!) But when we get to a song the congregation knows well, especially if the music is both singable and well-suited to the text, the full-throated song that comes forth from enthusiastic lungs is glorious. Nor is this a matter of genre, though certainly some song structures and musical choices lend themselves better to it than others. It is purely down to whether people can sing it or not.

Now, “singability” is not a fixed target—as that example of my friend’s half hour of instruction for a bunch of teenagers shows clearly. We can learn to sing better, and doing so changes what is singable for us. This is, in a word, practice.

III.

If we want to make a slightly strange picture comprehensible to a more general audience—

—then it probably behooves us to find things for them to hold onto in it, and also to do the work to explain it: to teach people how to see it well, as my friend taught those high schoolers how to sing. Here: the cars and the rainbow of colors in the parking garage, the man walking into the garage, the leading lines of the chains on the wall and the parking blocks on the ground and the oil spots all pulling the eye to the tower, the splash of color on the wall echoing the colors from the garage… There is a great deal about this scene that is interesting. That’s why I snapped the shot!

Now, this is hardly a great work of photographic art. It’s a decent bit of street photography that I am proud of, but there is much better street photography out there. It is, however, a little entry point into one of the kinds of photography I find particularly satisfying, much as we might need entry points into different (perhaps less straightforward) musical forms or genres.

IV.

As a composer, singability (and playability!) have to be first-class considerations in what I write. I have been mulling on whether I might be able to put together something for our little church choir or congregation for the Christmas season (the actual 12 days of Christmas that begin on Christmas Day and thus this year will include December 28th and January 4th). But to do that, I have to think about what can be learned well enough to sing on that kind of timeline.

I made a mistake in my previous writing for our church, the Sanctus for Epiphany I composed back in 2024. It opens with a sequence of meters that is just odd enough to throw people off: 3/4, 3/4, 2/4. (The rest of the piece is simply in 3/4.)

I wrote it that way simply because that was how it sounded right when I was first working out the rhythms at the piano. The congregation itself caught on just fine—an upside, I think, to how accustomed we all are to the more metrically complex motion of most modern “praise and worship music”, whatever its other strengths and weaknesses! Nearly all of the musicians who help lead the congregation struggled a bit, though, because it’s a little odd!

That does not make it wrong per se. That kind of metrical variation would have been just fine for a more practiced choir! But in context, it was a mistake. It did not help the people doing the singing to be able to learn it well and sing it gustily at first. It was a bit of a stumbling block, rather like a slightly-too-abstract-for-the-audience image. I was not writing well for my performers. And so if and as I try to write new works for our little congregation and its little choir, I’ll be looking for ways to keep the meter straightforward and the rhythms not too weird, with singability for these people in this context a top priority.

And at the same time, I’ll have in the back of my head this question: How might we help this congregation and choir grow a little more in their musical abilities, so that what feels singable in a few years is the kind of thing that would feel totally out of reach today? Not an easy question to answer, but one worth pondering, methinks.

🎵 Other notes

This past week, Brooke Fraser released a live recording album, Brooke Fraser – Live With the Auckland Philharmonia:

I very much enjoyed Fraser’s early work, and while I found her later work less compelling, this presentation of it made even those later projects work for me. It may or may not work for you if you’re a long-time fan: these arrangements are quite different from the originals. (They mostly did not land with my wife, for example!)

Perhaps my favorite part about this is that the arrangements are all from local-to-New Zealand composers. A whole bunch of them just got a much wider hearing across the world than they would have otherwise!

The Mountain Goats has a new album out: Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan. The pitch is… not simple! From the website:

A fishing boat, helmed by Captain Peter Balkan, sets sail from port with a crew of fifteen. In heavy waters on the open sea, the vessel keels over and is lost; only three of the crew survive. These three – Peter Balkan, a crewman named Adam, and an unnamed narrator – wash ashore on an islet too small and barren to sustain life. Captain Balkan, having sustained injury to his head in the wreck, begins to suffer great visions, prophesying the end of the world and the arrival of a new kingdom. As Balkan deteriorates, Adam goes missing, presumably drowned. The narrator is left to care for his captain in his final days. Alone, he imagines himself restored to society in the world before the wreck, vowing to remember his companions in catastrophe.

I listened to this start to finish on the drive out to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving and was delighted by it. It feels like what John Darnielle has been trying to do from the very beginning, but with production values that the decades-ago version of him could only dream of.

If you haven’t listened to any of the Mountain Goats before, you may find this a bit strange. But it’s worth it! Treat this album as a kind of musical narrative and embrace the quirks and you’ll find something worth coming back to (and an oeuvre worth exploring further). Check out the first track, “Overture”:

When I learned that Kevin Puts had written a 24-part song cycle setting Emily Dickinson’s poetry and recorded it with Time for Three and new-to-me (but probably not to the world of people who actually know vocal music!) Joyce DiDonato—you can listen to a few of the songs already—goodness gracious did I ever immediately pre-order the album: Emily — No Prisoner Be.

I heartily encourage you to do the same!

(I previously mentioned Puts’ excellent collaboration with Time for Three Contact on the album Letters for the Future back in my February 2025 issue: Work Harder. If you didn’t check out that album then, do it now!)

I notice that this range of artists is rather expressive of the themes in the essay—Fraser’s work is very approachable pop; the Mountain Goats is much less approachable but still recognizably influenced by pop and rock and other “popular” music; Puts’ work is pure contemporary classical, and while more approachable than a lot of avante garde music, still hardly mainstream. I didn’t plan that, but I am glad for the happy accident!

🎤 Links, updates, &c.

There isn’t much to say here this month, unfortunately. I have mucked around with a few ideas here and there, but the honest truth is that I have spent all my energy just keeping on top of normal life this month while working through ongoing back problems. (Pro tip: don’t get a herniated disc in your lower spine—or anywhere in your spine, actually. It goes poorly.) For large stretches of the month, I was getting 4–5 hours of sleep a night, and thus barely functioning during the day. Alas! I hope to have something more to share at the end of December, but we will see.

The one fun note I do have is: Back in October, I had a fun and rather strange accident on Spotify that resulted in The Desert getting almost a thousand streams in a matter of two days. The track ended up on a widely-listened-to playlist, but almost certainly as an accident given the rest of the tracks on the list. No matter the reason, I am happy to have gotten a few new listeners!

👋🏼 Happy November!

I hope all of you in America (or who otherwise partake of our holiday traditions for some reason) had an excellent Thanksgiving. I’ll return at the end of December with an end-of-year reflection on what I got done this year, and hopefully—hopefully!—with some of that Christmas music I’m thinking about and hoping to write!