First, apologies for missing a day! I cannot imagine how that happened as I have been thinking about music non-stop these days. Most specifically, I am pondering the chicken and egg aspects of composition.

Once one has studied music in a formal way one tends to think of composition coming before the sound. I am not so sure about that. We know that Mozart refers often in his piano writing to the "horn fifths," that classic configuration of tonic and dominant sound associated with the two horns he uses so often in his orchestrations. But is it that he refers to those sounds, or is it rather that those sounds actually are the root of the entire composition, hidden away as a sort of joke, waiting to be discovered and savored?