Composer · Orchestrator · Storyteller
John Whitlock
Stout
Music that knows you’re in the room.For the person in row 15 having a bad day.
Composer · Orchestrator · Storyteller
Music that knows you’re in the room.For the person in row 15 having a bad day.
Background
I write music that lands in a listener’s body before it reaches their intellect. I call my compositional philosophy Quintessentialism—the belief that formal ambition and emotional directness are not opposites. They never were.
My orchestral works have been recorded by world-class ensembles in Prague and Budapest. A security guard at a daycare listened to three sections and said she felt it in her chest. That’s the work. That’s always the work.
I’m building the audience on social media, co-founding the Northeastern University Composition Club, and writing for the millions of people who would love orchestral music if someone met them where they are.
Portfolio
Orchestral compositions recorded by premier European ensembles.
A four-movement symphony about growing up with severe PTSD, losing a friend to suicide, and learning that you cannot heal what you refuse to face. Written at eighteen.
An orchestral reckoning with the distance between what America believes itself to be and what it actually is. The ideals are worth believing in. The gap is worth grieving.
A piece about watching someone you love live with bipolar disorder—and learning that hope is not always healing. Sometimes it is just the decision to remain.
A 37-minute work for full orchestra and vocalist tracing the journey from emotional suppression to the courage of honest expression. The vocalist is the composer. The story is his.
Recognition
“‘The Burden of Having a Superpower’ by John W. Stout demonstrates this young composer's mastery of orchestration. Powerful, muscular writing comes to the fore, juxtaposed with moments of tenderness. John captures the pain and ecstasy of being alive.
Paul K. Joyce on The Burden of Having a Superpower
“Huge symphonic work my dear John! Wonderful!!! I took time to listen to the whole piece, bravissimo!!!!
Christian Lauba French composer, championed by György Ligeti, on The Burden of Having a Superpower
Rhetorical Quintessentialism: the belief that the most perfect form of a work of art is not determined by the standards of its discipline alone, but by the completeness of the argument it makes and the truth received by the person on the other side of it.
Read the Manifesto