mwkohout

mwkohout t1_it8pkty wrote

Reply to comment by sandiegoopera in Hi Reddit! I'm a Grammy winning classical composer, composer-in-residence for the Philadelphia Orchestra and I also founded a music academy. In two weeks, the San Diego Opera will premiere my first ever opera, El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego. AMA by sandiegoopera

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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mwkohout t1_it85cmw wrote

Reply to Hi Reddit! I'm a Grammy winning classical composer, composer-in-residence for the Philadelphia Orchestra and I also founded a music academy. In two weeks, the San Diego Opera will premiere my first ever opera, El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego. AMA by sandiegoopera

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?

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