Composer Nico Muhly in his Chinatown flat with his cat Duane.

Samantha West Samantha West

These are busy times for 26-year-old Nico Muhly, who is in the thick of writing a score for the American Ballet Theater, and hard at work on a couple of chamber works for orchestras in Seattle and Chicago.

“I’m a little out of control right now,” said Muhly from the New York studio he rents from minimalist composer Philip Glass. He has worked for Glass since he was 18.

“I have the pedal to the metal all the time.”

The other big commission on his plate, much to his own surprise, is creating a concert-opener for the Boston Pops, not the kind of assignment a hip young composer of probing esoteric scores tends to brag about.

“Initially my reaction was, ‘Oh my God, no.’ But I actually think there’s a way to make it work.

A rapid-speaking Muhly then slipped into one of his kaleidoscopic explanations about how he plans to draw inspiration from the music of Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist who went to Bali and made arrangements of the native gamelan orchestra. Although Muhly said his piece won’t be so much gamelan-inspired as music that has been inspired by music that has been inspired by the gamelan, like McPhee’s.

Muhly, who lives in a Chinatown loft with his cat, said he is less snobby about writing for an organization like the Pops than he might have been in years past. In fact, he spoke to Keith Lockhart on the phone, and contrary to the “complete nightmare” he expected, he found the Pops conductor “charming, smart and funny.

“He was really great talking to me about Messiaen. I had an out-of-body experience.”

Still, the Pops piece is a bigger challenge than writing dense, complex chamber symphonies for Seattle and Chicago.

“That is like a real pleasure for me. It feels like I’m really in my own head, cooking for me. While writing for the Boston Pops is sort of like throwing a garden party, where you’re not going to make some complicated thing where you have to torch the crème brulee. No, forget it.

“You have to make a big pasta salad and it has to be the best pasta salad ever.”

Muhly also has one other project on his pad, writing a piece for his alma mater, the Wheeler School. He returns today to Wheeler, where he will spend a couple days visiting English and performing arts classes, and speaking with students from grades 3 to 12 in special assemblies.

Tomorrow, as part of the spring choral concert, Two Trains will make its debut. The 8-minute piece, scored for piano duet, flute and chorus, is based on a poem by senior Hannah Jansen. Performances are at 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. in Wheeler Hall.

Muhly, whose parents are painter Bunny Harvey and filmmaker Frank Muhly, ardent East Siders, has been impressing the music world ever since he scribbled his first tune on a restaurant napkin at the age of 11. When he was about 15 he wrote a brash, dazzling piece laden with percussion that almost knocked his teacher at Tanglewood off his chair.

After Wheeler, Muhly attended Columbia as an English major, while taking music classes at Juilliard. He finished a master’s from Juilliard in 2004, and has been composing non-stop ever since, with pieces featured at Lincoln Center and on Zankel Hall’s “In Your Ear” festival.

There has been a lot of work, too, with Glass, things like copying parts and making demos. It’s a salaried job but not very specific. Right now Glass is writing a new opera for San Francisco called Appomattox and Muhly is just “sort of trailing behind making sure everything is in order.”

“My whole time at Juilliard Phil tried to get me to drop out. He said don’t waste your time on a master’s. Basically he said I just should be writing.

“But we get along well because he doesn’t have a relationship with my music. It’s more an avuncular relationship. He’ll listen to it, but it’s not an intense kind of thing.”

Muhly has done some projects with pop diva Bjork, playing the piano, doing some arranging and working on the score to Drawing Restraint 9. And he recently teamed up for an album with Bjork’s recording engineer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, that puts the listener right in the middle of the orchestra. The record, which just arrived in the U. S., is called Speaks Volumes.

“When I was at Juilliard I tricked my way into playing orchestral piano and celesta for a John Adams piece because I wanted to be inside that music. And the idea for my own recording was to make it sound as though you are inside the instruments or playing it yourself.

“It’s recorded incredibly close. There’s a violin piece where you can hear the breathing.”

Now he’s putting together a second album which features a substantial piece for an Icelandic trombone player and countertenor, along with organ and sound effects of airplanes and the like.

“Right now I’m so excited about it,” he said, “I’m twitching.”

Meanwhile, his piece for the Pops is due in June.

“I want to be a little more aggressive about saying genre doesn’t matter, as long as the music sounds good.

“It’s about the notes and the musicianship.”