Outlining a Piece - opposite of composition?

[mound]

I'm really interested in the idea of re-writing the score as an outline, outlining only the most important notes of the melody and bass notes that only hint at the overall harmonic structure and learning that first. To me, once the sound of the piece is really in my head after much listening, doing this, as Bernhard has described so many times, will help to gel the overall architecture of the entire piece in my fingers, at which point I start to add the more complex pieces back in after I work on the technique associated with them seperately. I was reading a post from a while back in which somebody asked about how to plan for/play large scale pieces, Bernhard talked about outlining it to plan for the larger scale harmonic motion and dynamics, and it occured to me, I wonder if this is how a composition is written in the first place?

I'm curious, is this the process one would follow (the greats have followed?) when composing pieces? Do they begin with a grand gesture, outlining it and then filling in the spaces with the details that make it the beautiful piece it is?

I've always wondered what process Chopin, or Bach or Beethoven followed to put a piece together.. Were they so genius that they just improvised something in a flash of brilliance, and retained every detail such that they could then notate it? Or was it more of a starting big and adding details sort of gesture? Or did they just hear the whole thing in all its detail in their heads and simply wrote it down, bar by bar?

If you are reading this and you are a composer, what is your process?

-Paul

[BoliverAllmon]

when I am composing for more than one voice or instrument this is how i do it. I first think of a melody. I then compose a good rhythmnical harmony with it. From there I can pull material from that melody and expound upon it, reuse it, invert it, transpose it, or do whatever else I want to do. I basically only have to really compose once every 20-30 measures. everything else is just alterations.

boliver

[galonia]

I think everyone does it differently.

I hear the whole piece in my head all at once, then I use the "outlining" techniques to help me get it down on paper, which I find is the most tedious part.

But the outlining method is good for understanding complex pieces - my teacher made me colour in various compositional devices in the 2-Part inventions by Bach when I was little, so that I could bring them out in my playing, and also to help my compositional technique.  When I got to playing his fugues, my teacher became ridiculous and made me write all the parts out separately; but there was method in the madness, and I found that in writing them out, I noticed little interesting things I wouldn't otherwise have seen or heard.