🎼 October 2024: The Rhythm of the Work
Creative work has its own rhythms. I finally—finally!—found one that works for me in this phase of life.
Hello!
I am still Chris Krycho, and I am still a working composer (among other things), and this is still my monthly music update. This month, “still” is a good way to put it, but I think I am finding my feet, as it were.
🎼 On the craft
Earlier this year I set what I thought was a very doable goal: Write ten bars of music every week. My thinking was simple. Even given I am writing for an orchestra, ten bars is not that much. When I am in a “flow” state, I can write ten bars of richly orchestrated music in somewhere between thirty and ninety minutes, depending on tempo and orchestration. Surely, I thought, I can do that much every week!
While I may have ended up averaging something close to that over the time since I had set that goal, it absolutely has not gone the way I hoped.
I tried doing it in the evenings, but by the time the kids were abed, I often found myself far too tired to try to compose.1 That goes double for the weeks I am preparing to play piano for our church, when my practice time is substantially higher.
I tried doing it on weekends, but weekends are unpredictable and often quite full, and they are also an important time to do family time with my wife and daughters. Every once in a while, I would have a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon open up and really make good progress on the work. More often, though, I did not get to composing at all.
I tried just doing it midday each day, inspired by my friend Anthony (mentioned in the last issue of the newsletter). He told me how each day, sometime in the day when he hits the point where his brain seems stuck on some coding problem or another, he takes a 20-minute break and composes. That seemed like a good idea, but it did not work for me. At the points when my brain feels like that, the only thing that I can consistently do to get out of it is go for a walk or run or ride. Worse, once I am deep in my workday, I struggle to disengage and reengage mentally from “work mode”.
I tried doing it in the morning, feeling resigned to that not working like everything else… and it worked. The past two weeks, every weekday morning (except today, when my music time was allocated to this newsletter) I have spent somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes composing, before beginning work. At that point, I am mentally fresh, in one of my most energetic times of day, and not yet feeling the need to drive forward to completion on some work task or another.
Why do I do my best work, whether programming, writing, or, yes, composing, 7–10am, 3–6pm, and 8pm–12am? I have no idea. Those are my rhythms, though. I have known that for years about writing and programming. It probably should have been obvious that early mornings would be a good time for me for composing, too. Now I know!
Those short blocks are unsurprisingly productive when put together, too. No different than my running training: you string together enough work consistently, and you get results. The key is getting to a point where you no longer consider skipping the run, or the 20–30-minute composing block, because it is just part of what you do. I am not quite there yet for the composing, but it is getting close.
I am profoundly glad to have found—at least for now, for this phase of life—the rhythm of the work that lets me keep at it.
🎵 Other notes
This month’s music recommendation is the fantastic Danish String Quartet. I came across them by way of Alan Jacobs a few years ago, and have followed them enthusiastically ever since. Their music is a delightful mix of traditional tunes, the classical repertoire, and contemporary works. They are immensely listenable.
(True story: they released a pair of albums back in the 2000s as the Young Danish String Quartet. As a man now in my late 30s and thus no longer young myself, the inevitable renaming to simply Danish, rather than Young Danish, amuses me greatly.)
If you want a good entry point, and you are:
- Deeply into the classical repertoire: their Nielsen: Complete String Quartets or the Prism series (Beethoven in conversation with Bach and others!) are good entry points.
- Not so deeply into classical music: their most recent album Keel Road is a good one; so is their 2014 album Wood Works
- Not sure what you are or where to start: their website features a host of videos to let you sample their sound.
If you’re reading this online, or someone forwarded it to you and you enjoyed it, subscribe!
🎤 Links, updates, &c.
I have been relatively quiet about music on social media lately. One goal for the rest of the year is to post small updates about the work as I go, in the interest of building up a bit more of an audience. You can help me with this: what kinds of things would you find interesting on microblog platforms like Bluesky/Twitter/Threads/Mastodon? What about on Instagram or Facebook? (Especially given that video is incredibly time-consuming and therefore low-priority for me!)
Would any of you like it if I produced an audio version of this as a lightweight “podcast”? I can do that in fairly short order, though it would likely tend to arrive a day or two after the newsletter itself. Let me know!
The big orchestral work is coming along steadily. I set a goal at the start of this month to write a minute of music. I did not quite manage that, but I did write about 45 seconds of music I am fairly happy with. It needs revision! So do the earlier movements in the work, but for right now, I am staying in writing mode.
Just today I acquired a new domain: chriskrycho.music. At the moment this newsletter goes out, that link will not go anywhere, but hopefully sometime in the next week it will “light up” and start directing people to music.chriskrycho.com. Having a .music domain is pretty cool!
👋🏼 Happy October!
As ever, thank you for reading and listening! I hope your October has been excellent, and that your November is as well. May you do good work, whatever your endeavors!
-
Or indeed to do much of anything generative. I wrote about this dynamic over on my main blog. ↩