September 30, 2024

🎼 September 2024: Free Espresso

How I learned to love espresso. (Yes, this is a metaphor for learning to love classical music.) Also: links to music by Baron Ryan, Anthony Plopper, and Sam Hulick!

Hello!

I am Chris Krycho, a working composer (among other things), and this is my monthly music update. It’s September 30, 2024, feeling gloriously autumnal here on the front range. I have written lots of music this month, and the leaves are turning many lovely shades of red and gold and orange, and here I am (for my American readers, at least) sneaking in this issue before the end of the month.

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🎼 On the craft

It was a little over 11 years ago that I had my first shot of straight espresso. I was, to say the least, skeptical when the barista handed it to me. But it was free, so I was willing to try it. And it was… interesting. When I first sipped it, I wasn’t sure if I liked it, and I was especially unsure if I would ever have another. But, well: it was free every single Friday, and I liked the lattes at that coffee shop,¹ and if I happened to end up there on Fridays, well, who could turn down free?

By the time we moved from North Carolina to Colorado in 2017, I had gone from the kind of guy who drinks only the sugariest of lattes and those mostly only to have a reasonable excuse to be in the coffee shop for a few hours, to an out and out espresso aficionado. I learned how to make my own very good pour-over coffee at home, and the first thing I look for when visiting a city is its coffee shops. I have diagnostic questions to figure out the caliber of any shop’s baristas and the quality of its coffee before I even taste it.² Not in a mean way, but in the way of someone who loves the goodness of a thing and knows how to adjust on the fly based on what is on offer.

When I first visited that coffee shop all those years ago, though, my idea of coffee was that it needed to be drowned in sugar to be tolerable. The folks who ran that shop knew that was most people’s experience of coffee, because that is mostly what is on offer in mainstream American coffee. You should, as a rule, not ask for straight espresso from your average restaurant, nor from Starbucks. It will not be a particularly pleasant experience. That is not to slag on your average restaurant or on Starbucks, either; it is just the same reason you would not ask for your Big Mac “medium rare”.

So the folks at that coffee shop would sometimes tell regulars, gently, and in a friendly way, “Hey, you might try the coffee black before you put anything in it today. I think you might be surprised!” And not always, but sometimes, people would take their advice, and their life would change: coffee can be like this: sweet, not bitter; complex, not just a single note of “roastiness”! When friends visit, and I make them coffee, as happened earlier this month, I often tell them: “You can do whatever you want to my coffee, and I will not be offended. But you have to taste it first!” Because, sometimes—not always, but sometimes—they taste it, and have that same reaction. They discover that they actually like coffee, when the coffee is good.

Espresso is more difficult though. Like whiskey, espresso is a sipping drink; at its mildest it is a very intense tasting experience. No one, I think, “likes it” on first taste the way you might “like” something confectionary. The taste for it has to be acquired. It rewards sustained attention, though. It rewards those who develop their taste for it.

The folks who ran that shop knew that, so they did something smart: Free Espresso Friday. You could come in and ask, and they would give you a free double shot of a single origin espresso—a different espresso every few weeks, sourced and roasted by the good folks at Counter Culture Coffee. That meant that if you were a regular, you might get to try dozens of different coffees as espresso in a year. Given the way we regulars tended to order food and to frequent the place on other days, I imagine they at least broke even on that. Even if not, though, they clearly cared that people learned what espresso could be, and were profitable enough to eat the cost of free single origin espressos.

Composed music—classical, contemporary, and everything in between—is often like espresso.

Since high school, I have been keenly aware that many people do not get classical music. Any number of my peers would talk about how boring it was, and how much more they liked mainstream rock, and how classical music was all the same. Even back then, I understood, to some extent, what they meant. I always disagreed, and still do, but they were expressing something real, however inarticulate their expression.

Well—I should say they were expressing at least two real things, and one of them inarticulately: something about their own taste as it was at the time, and also something about classical music in relation to other more popular musical forms with which they were familiar. Those two things are not the same, though they are certainly connected.

That brings me to Eímear Noone. Noone is a composer, orchestrator, and conductor, best known for her work conducting video game scores. Watch her conduct anything; I particularly enjoy the way she approaches a medley from the Halo games, but truly, just find anything on YouTube: the woman clearly loves what she does, and is good at it.

In an interview, she described the dynamic of conducting video game music with the orchestra like this (read the whole quote; it’s worth it):

We’re on this hydraulic stage in the basement—I mustn’t have been listening or paying attention to that particular detail—and I’m looking at the players, and they’re looking at me, and I go, “How did we get here, exactly?” Then, the stage started to rise. It was like the slowest fairground ride ever. I was unaware of the seating capacity in the building. I think it’s about 6,000 people. I had my back to the audience, and we’re rising out of the ground, and all of a sudden, there’s this absolute roar from the crowd. I was bowled over by it, and I thought, “What on Earth is this?” And it was just us, the orchestra.

We’re not used to the rockstar treatment. I think we should all be cheering for “The Rite of Spring” like lunatics, but people don’t. That was my first experience with that audience, and I thought, “These people are absolutely nuts about the same thing as me,” which is the orchestra. Their support and the way they treat the orchestra just makes me love them forever. No matter what I do in music, and I’ve done a lot of crazy things, I’ll always come back to this audience, because they’re so endearing. You get multiple generations, and the medium that gets them in the door to hear the orchestra is video games, and I think it has to be embraced. There are still orchestras catching on. They’re like, “Oh my God, look at the way the audience is going crazy for it, and the music isn’t bad.” I’m like, “Yep.”

I love when we have a principal cellist, if we’re doing something like Gustavo Santaolalla’s The Last of Us score, or some of my friend Austin Wintory’s Journey score, and I’ll say, “You don’t even know, mate. You don’t even know that you are a complete rock star. Just wait until you see how people react to your solo.” They look at me like I’m half daft, and then you see these incredibly experienced musicians play this music and the audience goes absolutely nuts. You’ll see these principal cellists’ façade fall away to complete amazement. It’s very moving to me.

I have not been able to stop thinking about that. It gives me chills. She’s right.

Most video game and film music is not as complex or as “sophisticated” as most traditional classical music. It does not have to be, though, to be good orchestra music. Orchestras playing video game music—or playing John Williams and Ludwig Göransson while showing with the films they scored—is a lot like the outstanding lattes I had at that coffee shop before I realized what black coffee could be, still less what good espresso could be. I still like those lattes sometimes: they are good! When people come to trust you because you serve them the best lattes they have ever had, they might just be willing to try the black coffee with a nudge. Given Göransson, people might just be willing to try Beethoven, too. Build up enough trust, and they might be willing to try out the espresso—or listen to something difficult but rewarding at the orchestra: John Adams or Anna Cline on the easier side, or Schönberg or Henryk Górecki on the more difficult side. (Even I don’t drink straight espresso every day!)

And of course, thinking about those old high school acquaintances: they played video games of all sorts and liked (or at least did not mind) the music… and there is an awful lot of rock in the guts of video game orchestra music, just as there is a good deal of Beethoven and Mahler in there. They might—like me with espresso—be able to develop a taste for it. They might not, too: my dear wife Jaimie appreciates most espresso like I appreciate most jazz: intellectually, but without any desire to partake of it directly. Taste can be like that. I am glad I learned to love espresso, though, and I think a lot more people could learn to love classical music… if we offered them something like Free Espresso Friday.

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If someone forwarded you this email, it’s clearly because they have great taste in composers (me, I am bold enough to say!) and in friends (you!), so read on—and maybe even subscribe if you like what you read here? Or, if you’re a long-time subscriber, I’d love it if you thought about who might appreciate this, and passed it along to them.

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🎵 Other notes

Three outbound links this week!

1. First, a timely note: my old friend Barron Ryan (whose There Arises Light I shared with you previously) is playing a concert in Boston this Thursday evening (October 3) at 7pm Eastern. If any of you out there are Bostonians or happen to be in the area, you should absolutely get tickets and attend. He’s premiering another new work!

2. Second, I recently reconnected with another old college friend whose music I am delighted to commend to you! A few weeks ago, our old college friends Anthony and Megan Plopper visited. I knew Anthony by way of our both studying music composition at OU, as well as a lot of overlap in various Christian campus ministries, so I was delighted to learn that he has also kept up his composing. Like me, he has also started daring to actually put things out into the world over the past few years! He has been setting various Scriptural texts word for word—a serious challenge, given that it requires through composing, since refrains and other hallmarks of English poetry are not common even in the poetic parts of the Bible.

   Anthony’s approach combines a sensitivity to those challenges with piano technique I wish I possessed and a great ear for text setting. Listening to these pieces off and on, I keep thinking about both Keith Green and Psallos—two very different kinds of music, but both trying to do the same kind of hard, interesting work Anthony is doing. Check out his first EP, Scripture Songs, Vol 1: Forever & Ever.³ I am looking forward very much to seeing this project keep going over the years ahead.

3. Third, someone with a much bigger audience than mine, but who many of you still might not know and who you should know: Sam Hulick has a delightful new album out, School of Thought. I first came across Sam via his work on the Mass Effect games in the 2000’s and 2010’s. School of Thought has a lot of that same feel, and makes for both good listening in its own right and also great concentrating/working/thinking music. (The title would suggest that was his aim, in which case: he succeeded.) Give it a listen!

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🎤 Links, updates, &c.

I wrote music this month! A lot of it. I sat down with the third movement of this major orchestral work and ripped out some of it which I knew was wrong—indeed, which I have known for years it was wrong, but I was working on the first two movements!—and replaced it with something much, much better. All told, over the span of eight hours on a Saturday, I wrote over a minute of music, reasonably well-orchestrated, and I have a very good idea of where the next several minutes of the movement will be going.

When I started on this piece at the age of 34, I set a goal of finishing it by the time I am 40. That is looking increasingly likely, since I only have about a third of it left to go after a bit over 3 years, still have almost 3 years to go on that timeline, and may well end up finish two movements this year after (finally) finishing the first movement late last year. In fact, I am getting close to the point where I may start talking about what this thing actually is. Not yet. But soon.

A goal for October: to imitate a habit my friend Anthony told me about and compose for 20 minutes a day. That’s not much! But if you do it every work day, you can make a lot of progress. It’s a hard habit for me to get started, but I hope that like many such good habits, once it’s going, it will be easier to sustain.

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👋🏼 Happy September!

I will be back with another missive in late October, full of even more autumnal cheer, and hopefully with more good news about this big orchestral work!