@craigmod.com is walking again, and you can read along. Pop-up newsletter: you get daily missives for the two weeks he’s doing this, and then the whole list is deleted. One of my favorite things on the web! craigmod.com/ridgeline/216/

New @doricoofficial.bsky.social release! blog.dorico.com/2025/10/dori... Already installed this and made some improvements to the symphony via its instrument range proofreading. As the post says: it’s sometimes easy to miss in a big score, and the proofreading tool puts all the info in one spot! 🎉

My monthly #music missive! Thinking about the chasms between finishing a work and its finding an audience; and also—for some kinds of work—finding others who love it enough to bring it into the world with you by performing it. newsletter.music.chriskrycho.com/archive/sept...

Discovered while prepping this month’s newsletter (courtesy of a good reminder by @scarradini.bsky.social of this particular work): John Luther Adams is on Bandcamp. YESSSSS. Love to see “significant” musicians on independent distribution channels. johnlutheradams.bandcamp.com/album/become...

Back from a travel week, back at composing. Which today mostly means ripping things out. Remember when I said I had found my way to the start of the conclusion of Mvt. III? 😂 Well. About that. I was iffy on it even before the trip but now? RIP IT OUT, do something different. Onward.

Happy 90th birthday Arvo Pärt!

Spoilers: tonic too soon and too strongly. 😂 Need to find a different way to get there and to hit it appropriately for the conclusion here. Don’t conclude the first time I get back to the tonic.

Really good music has layers to it that you continue to discover through repeated, attentive listenings

1. I really like a lot of Messiaen’s work. 2. It is *not* “working music”. I think that’s largely a compliment! It demands attention and engagement. It refuses to be background material. There’s something interesting there about “working music” in general.

Started the conclusion of Mvt. III in the #symphony this morning. I’ve been building my way toward it for the past couple of weeks (in my little 20–30-minute stretches) and today: boom, there’s the tonic we’ve been dancing toward and then backing away from for a couple minutes worth of #music. 🎼

Reminded myself this morning—because I had to—that it doesn’t matter how stuck you feel when you stare at the page. “Composer’s block”, like “writer’s block”, just means it’s time to start. Or take a walk and *then* start. But start. Momentum begets momentum, and stagnation, stagnation. Do the work!

My History colleagues are looking for a Europeanist who can also teach in a non-Western area. I'd personally be enthusiastic about another French speaker joining the college. We have a lovely Francophone community of faculty and students, and there are French lunches on campus twice a month!

As was foretold—the video version of my monthly #music newsletter is now live: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKiQ... Now with tiny bits of orchestra music that I wrote for the intro and outro! And I do mean *tiny*. But it was a fun little thing to do with my free time on Labor Day today.

Video takes such a shocking amount of time to do well. The ~10-minute video versions of the essays I write for my music newsletter every month are the longest part of the project—it’s not even close. Some of that is my lack of practice, but some of it is just how many kinds of work it entails!

There is no substitute for having a great #teacher. Take it from me: I have been an autodidact in nearly every discipline I practice! But as I tease out in this month’s #music newsletter, teachers take you places you cannot take yourself. newsletter.music.chriskrycho.com/archive/augu...

Therefore, tomorrow will see my usual monthly music newsletter release, including notes (no pun intended) on how much progress I made on the symphony. Even if no one ever performs it, I’m writing it through to the finish. Hopefully someone will perform it! But I’m writing it no matter what.

On the one hand, I totally get why ~no one is subscribed to my music newsletter or social media. I am, as composers go, a nobody. On the other hand, it sure is hard to keep putting things out into the world when the response is deafening silence. I keep at it anyway. It’s that or give up. Nope. 😮‍💨

These numbers don’t tell you *everything* about the state of my first #symphony, but they do tell you *some* things. • Bars: 954 • Notes: 25841 • Key signatures: 13 • Time signatures: 22 • Dynamics: 3912 • Immediate tempos: 25 • Gradual tempos: 6 • Rehearsal marks: 80 It’s a lot of #music!

It’s Friday evening, work is done, my wife is on a call for an upcoming acting gig, and my daughtres are reading and #composing some #music in GarageBand respectively. So what about me? I’m composing, too: pushing toward the ending of Mvt. III of this #symphony. 🎼

This morning’s work on the #symphony: a bit of orchestration work, filling in some holes. I’m not exactly stymied on continuing Mvt. III, but I don’t know *exactly* where to go—so I just found a way to make some some progress rather than none. #music #composing

I had to remind myself that I have written a lot more new #music for the symphony this year than the total runtime of the mockup would suggest: the net is just 39 seconds so far (from 30:12 to 30:51), but I cut 32 seconds from Mvt. II! So: 71 seconds. 🚀 Also, those bars I cut will be back… later.

A whee bit of progress this morning on Mvt. III. There’s a bit mid-way through it that has niggled at me every time I have listened to the mockup over the past month or two, but I have been focused on making progress toward the conclusion and so ignored it. Not today! I fixed it. 😎 🎼

July newsletter is out! It’s a meditation on staying the course—as I work on my first symphony and am in that “slog in the middle” that is, as I note in the newsletter, not just normal but indeed a *norm* for every large undertaking.

THE MOST INCREDIBLE GESTURE AN AUDIENCE CAN EVER SHOW TO AN ORCHESTRATOR... after 2+ hours of listening to Signature Choir sing with my orchestrations with Sydney Symphony, the audience sings a karakia of thanks to the performers.

Back at the end of January, I shared this video essay on art and creativity and the tension between the joy of creative work and the ambition to create something great. I’ve made some progress on that tension since publishing this… in part because I published it! www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM2Q...

Listening yesterday and today to Alexandre Tharaud’s “Bach: Concertos Italiens” recordings. Pretty sure this is going on my “purchase and have in my library regardless of licensing shenanigans” list. music.apple.com/us/album/bac...

Status: analyzing music I wrote a couple weeks ago to understand what I did intuitively so I can iterate on it intentionally. It’s really fun: I⁶ – IV – V – vi – iii⁶₄ – I² – vi⁷ – IV – IV⁶₄ – V⁶/V – V⁷/V – V/iii – iii – V⁶/V – V – IV – V⁶ – …and then: somewhere!

#art is often like this in my experience. In the same way that constraints and limitations often make for better creative work, so do circumstances that might at first seem inauspicious at best. There is usually *something* interesting to pull from them. Here: one of my all-time favorite photos!

Trying to get back in the habit of posting photos to my website more regular. Today: one I took back in April in downtown Denver when a friend visited. “You took a picture of a wall”—yes, but it’s an *interesting* wall with *interesting* things in front of it! v5.chriskrycho.com/photos/downt...

It’s June 30—time for my monthly music newsletter to go out! This month: riffing briefly on a note from @craigmod.com: the work is the work. The meta-work matters, but it is not the work. And so: back to work—in my case, composing! What about you? newsletter.music.chriskrycho.com/archive/june...

Status: trying to get back in the groove on the #symphony after a month in which I didn’t do a ton because I was busy with things like ramping up at a new job, giving a conference keynote, and running my first marathon. 😅 #composing #orchestra #music

This month’s newsletter, continuing my exploration of how musical interpretation works—this time, focused on titles and how they inform what we understand a piece to be doing. newsletter.music.chriskrycho.com/archive/may-... Now with a comments box! I’d love to hear your thoughts on titles for art!

Music newsletter day! This month: on instrumentation—with my recent work “Holy Saturday” as a jumping-off point, links to new music from Austin Wintory and a good post about Spotify, and some comments on the @doricoofficial.bsky.social 6.0 release! newsletter.music.chriskrycho.com/archive/apri...

@doricoofficial.bsky.social 6 is out! Insta-buy! blog.dorico.com/2025/04/dori...

I’m dealing with a lot more ephemeral dev environments at the new gig, so I needed to actually finally get around to automating having my toolkit up and ready easily. I’m far from done with this, but: I’m getting there, using the excellent mise-en-place. v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/using-...

Came back to working on the symphony after finishing up Holy Saturday and… discovered that I wanted to rework the introduction to Mvt. II, which has been sitting basically the same since roughly June 2021, when I started sketching this thing. Revision is a strange process!

Published last Friday: new #music: a work for Holy Saturday. (Terrible timing marketing-wise but hey: it comes around every year!) 3 versions: • solo piano • violin, viola, cello, and bass • chamber orchestra Give it a listen and let me know what you think! music.chriskrycho.com/works/holy-s...

I am signing out of social media for Lent, as I do also during Advent and at least once in mid-summer. If you’d like to keep up with my work, see my website and, in the case of my musical endeavors in particular, my newsletter. Grace and peace to all of you! newsletter.music.chriskrycho.com

Immediate response: OOOOOOOH ✨ 🌌 🎼

The run on which I took these beautiful photos was terribly frustrating: the first photo was shot along one of the few clear spots on the whole course. Most of it was, by contrast, covered in black ice—you can see just a bit of that at the edge of the frame in the second photo. (1/3)

This is really fun: short, sweet, and energetic. 🎵

Newsletter time! This month, what I would tell myself in 2005–2009 if I had a time machine—work harder! Because it would have paid such great dividends if I had. newsletter.music.chriskrycho.com/archive/febr... #music #composing #art #hardwork

For a few years now, I have been a fan of this party trick: reach down into my backpack, which looks like a normal backpack, and instead acts like a TARDIS or Bag of Holding. I can take my MIDI Keyboard to a coffee shop! 🤯 youtube.com/shorts/yfhdZ...

This won’t be a “new release” for much longer! But it has officially made its way to alllllll the services (I recently got a notice that it was live on iHeartRadio, which I had forgotten all about!). As I put it in the forthcoming issue of my newsletter: (1/3)

Okay, who are #composers and #musicians doing interesting stuff on Bluesky—particularly folks with a high-music-to-other-content ratio, much as I have in this account (compare to my “main” account where reposts from here maybe 10% of the content, if that)?

From the draft of this month’s newsletter issue (out later this week): ‘Maybe we need a “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-AndAlsoTellMe” variant!’ CC-BY-SA-TM! I wrote that half-in-jest, but only half! When I put works out under CC-BY-SA, I want to hear if people do something cool with it.

#moon at #sunset in the #winter – again, the kind of thing that makes me want to #compose some quiet piece of #music to convey the *sense* of the thing somehow.

A beautiful, thoughtful poem from Jaimie Krycho (yep: she’s my wife, and she’s an incredibly talented artist)— jaimiekrycho.com/reflection-o...

Jotting down some musical ideas before the girls got up, as I practice writing better/more interesting/just-plain-different melodies. #composing #practice #melody #harmony #music

I know some of you prefer Spotify, so here’s our little #church #choir and congration #singing the Sanctus I wrote for us to sing throughout Epiphany last year: open.spotify.com/track/3OwnM1... More links forthcoming as it goes live across various stores and services! #music #composing #Anglican