September 30, 2025

🎼 September 2025: Two Strange Chasms

On finding not only an audience but performers for our works.

Autumn! It is the season for cozy evenings by a fire, running races in blissfully cool weather, leaves falling, and of course—at least in the context of this particular newsletter— composing orchestra music. Today: a reflection on (nearly?) all artists’ desire for their art to be appreciated by others—and many artists’ need for others to appreciate their art for it even to come to life.

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This is a monthly musical missive 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!

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🎼 On the craft

You can also watch this essay here:

Two strange chasms stand between the creation of art and its appreciation by an audience.

First: Although the creation of art is often (not always, but often) solitary, it is rarely (not never, but rarely) made solely for the enjoyment of its creator. It is meant, almost always, to be shared: a novel to be read, a screenplay to be acted and filmed, a painting to be seen, a symphony to be played, a play to be staged, a sculpture to be admired.

Now, it is one thing to want to share one’s work with others, in whatever fashion is appropriate to the art. It is another thing to want one’s work to endure. Not a bad thing, per se, but a very different thing. It is an ambition that can become unhealthy, can distort our work, can discourage us from simply doing the ordinary task ahead of us.

Most art that most people have ever made did not endure down to the present.

That goes of course for most of what we now call folk art, which was simply the ordinary artistic stuff of life for most people before the 20th century. People sang their songs and painted their homes and composed their poems for themselves and each other. They did it for the joy of making their homes and lives lovelier. I have no expectation that anyone will want the architecture and landscape photographs I have taken and that adorn my office, and that is fine and good. It is good to remember that this is the native mode of art in life: as transient and passing as we are, grass in the sun.

Even in the fields we may now think of as consisting of “great” or “high” art, though, most works do not last. Most musical works from the 18th and 19th century do not endure. Nor do most novels, plays, or paintings. That goes for a good deal of dreck-of-the-day that we are happy did not survive, of course. It goes, too, though, for all but the very most-celebrated, most-preserved works of the ages before us.

Bach had many contemporaries. Unless you studied music history rather assiduously, though, I would bet you cannot name more than a handful of them. (I don’t doubt someone in my readership will come back with a list of a dozen contemporaries, but I also doubt it will be many of you!) Most of their works lasted little past their deaths, if that, and have not come down to us at all—even those who were nearly as famous as Bach in their own days. The same goes for the Romantic period, and every period since.

This is normal. Indeed, the fact that we have any music from ages past is the odd bit, a quirk mostly limited to the Western “common practice” musical tradition. More plays and even novels survive, across cultures, than do musical works; more still for paintings and sculptures, especially from earlier centuries, than other forms of art. Most art through most ages has been for the people in one particular place and time, though: court music and music from the countryside alike.

The first chasm, then, is simply finding an audience at all—particularly for art that aims to go beyond the people amongst whom we find ourselves. We want our works to be enjoyed, and this is right. Sometimes we also want them to be enjoyed broadly, and this can be right, though it can also be a distorting ambition. Wanting ours to endure is still more dangerous—an ambition perhaps best set aside entirely! They will, or they will not; all our self-promotion will like as not make little difference in the end, and make us wearisome to those around us. (See: social media.)

The second chasm is of a different sort: For many of our works, their fruition is at some point out of our hands. A novel and a play differ sharply here. To complete the writing of a novel, even with help of editor and—perhaps—publisher, is to put the work into the world. It requires still an audience, but no more than that. To complete the writing of a script is not to put it into the world, but to ask a new set of questions: will this find its players? For only then can it have a chance at finding an audience. However much we may enjoy reading a script, that is not a play’s true form. A play not staged is a play not come to fruition.

All we can do with this kind of work—a script, a screenplay, a symphony—is offer them to the world around us and hope they find not only an audience but people who find them lovely enough to stage, to film, to perform. Our works are nothing without those collaborators, and we can go looking for them, but we cannot conjure them, cannot command them, can only hope that our work is good enough to catch someone’s eye, that we can get that lucky break, that we will find people who somehow come to love our work—if not as we do then enough to give themselves to making something of it in the world with us.

What a gift, then, when we do find those partners.

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🎵 Other notes

I continue my slow march through my Apple Music catalog, purchasing a couple beloved albums every month. This month, it was Michael Torke’s Sky. (Bonus: that link is a link to a page on his website where you can buy it directly from him. So: do that! I wish I had realized that before buying it myself—it’s a good reminder always to check the artist’s site.) It’s a lovely album with four concertos: one each for violin, bassoon, oboe, and clarinet. The concertos for violin and oboe are my favorites on the album, but all of them are quite good.

I’m not the only one to say so, either: the violin concerto that gives the album its title, Sky, was nominated for a Grammy and was a Pulitzer finalist. It is a classically American-sounding work: big echoes of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein—and occasional hints, in its orchestration, of John Williams.

Torke’s works are, in the caramel macchiato-to-straight espresso axis, something like a lightly-roasted Ethiopian coffee: approachable and enjoyable for anyone who already “gets” classical music. It isn’t a film or game soundtrack; it requires a touch more of you than that. You won’t find it off-putting or difficult coming from an appreciation of any traditional “classical” music, though; there is nothing of the avant garde in Sky, and all of his work I have listened to is comfortably tonal. Modern in its orchestration and sensibilities, but approachable.

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Last month I asked what late 20th or early 21st century composer’s works you most often return to.

Reader and long-time collaborator Stephen Carradini replied (links and formatting added by me):

John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean is still deeply enmeshed in my mind. He’s remained (very) productive since then, but it's Become Ocean that gets me.

I second the recommendation! Who else do you all listen to?

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🎤 Links, updates, &c.

Today’s essay grew out of two realizations that have been much on my mind this past month:

First, that the symphony I am composing has very little chance of ever being performed, still less recorded. That is simply the reality of any orchestral work, still less one at the scale of a symphony, for most composers. Orchestras are massively oversubscribed for potential music, not least because their core audiences generally want programs filled mostly with the old reliable standbys.¹

This is, to say the least, a discouraging prospect.

Second, though, that however low the chances of this symphony’s being performed, they are infinitely lower—precisely zero, in fact—if I let that discouragement stop me from finishing it. But the tension I described above is real. If never finish this, I will be sad never to have finished it and given it a chance to be performed. But if I do and it is never performed, I will then have to face the reality of a work meant to be shared, meant to be played, that never is.

This is, to say the least, a craggy road to walk as a would-be artist. I am hardly the first to walk it, though, and many a better artist than I has had to walk it too.

So what has walking it meant, this month? Well, courtesy of some travel for both work and a writing project on education and artificial intelligence—more on the latter on my main website at some future date—I had rather less time than usual this month for composing. I nonetheless made some meaningful progress on the symphony: I began working on the conclusion to the third movement… then promptly scrapped that version of it, rewrote the entire section leading into it, and tried again, keeping only a few bits of the previous version. The results were much better. Sometimes that’s how it goes. This month, it went that way a lot. Mid-month I also reworked and compressed much of what I had written in late August and the first weeks of September. I netted only 16 seconds of music in the past 30 days, but those seconds were hard won.

I also suggested last month that I might give myself liberty to write a tiny bit of music to go with the video version of the newsletter, and on Labor Day, I did just that! These little snippets are small and simple, but I like them, and they make for a much nicer version of my video intros and outros.

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👋🏼 Happy September!

Thanks for reading. As ever, if you particularly enjoyed this or found it interesting, would you do me the favor of sending it along to someone else who might enjoy it? I would deeply appreciate it. I will be back at the end of October with another musing, more links, and maybe (just maybe!) the news that I have finished the third movement. Likely? No. Possible? Just! Stay tuned.