mwkohout t1_it85cmw wrote
Hi-thank you for doing this.
As someone who primarily plays music but tries to dabble with composition I’ve got some questions on how you manage your work.
When you’re starting a new piece of music, what’s your workflow?
For example-
Do you start by writing short (perhaps monophonic) phrases?
Do you then take these short phrases and expand on them, creating variations and perhaps adding additional parts(which themselves might have started as short monophonic phrases), then massaging them/chaining them into a completed piece of music?
Do you sketch the general architecture or choose some form (A part is in F maj that modulates to key XY and Z, then B part modulates from Z back to F maj )?
What tools do you use to help you stay in this workflow? Is it manual, with paper, or is there some software tooling that helps you manage it all?
sandiegoopera OP t1_it8c2qz wrote
It sounds like you've already started developing a process -- This is all very detailed!
I admit that my brain works differently when it comes to composing, a kind of "guided/assessed mental improv"... For instance, if you and I were to have a conversation, while we're hopefully connecting and speaking on the same subject, we're also improvising our words. We're not reading from a script, in other words, but coming up with spontaneous responses to one another. Yet, our words are also guided by the subject matter as well as the specifics of language, grammar, etc.
So, in contrast to what you're describing above, I compose more in this vein. It's a pretty perfect marriage of intuition and intellect that seems to work well for me.
mwkohout t1_it8pkty wrote
So, would you describe this as your mature process?
It might be hard to remember but do you remember your process before it became so personally..intuitive?
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