12.02.2026

This week I’m in Luzern teaching composition at a new music academy. I’ve met several young composers, and yesterday I organized a collective class where we could all just sit together and talk. I’m realizing more and more how necessary it is to share doubts out loud, not only ideas or finished thoughts, but also confusions, hesitations, things that are still forming. Hearing how others think always shifts my own perspective a little.

I mostly wanted to talk about form, because it seems to be something composers only really start thinking about later, once they feel (or think) they understand sound and material well enough. I told them about my recent reflections on time, which I wrote about in another post in November 2025, and during the discussion one student mentioned space. I don’t even clearly remember the exact question they asked — it was very late in the day and my mind was already tired — but it doesn’t really matter. The word stayed with me. Just the fact that they said “space,” probably in relation to how I described form as the space around sound, suddenly gave me something new to think about.

It made me feel that maybe there is another way to approach this whole question, without trying to confront time too directly. Time feels too abstract when I try to isolate it, as if I’m attempting to grasp something with no edges, no resistance. I keep asking myself where time begins, how to construct it before sound exists, how to hold it in my mind as a material. But perhaps the question itself already places me in an impossible position.

Since that conversation, I’ve been thinking that space might offer another entry point. Not space as a neutral container, but as something active, something already full of potential. Almost like in Alvin Lucier’s work, where a room is never really empty but full of latent resonances, frequencies that are just waiting to be revealed. If every space already carries its own sonic possibilities, then composing space might already mean composing a certain kind of time. A resonant space stretches sound. A dry space shortens it. Distance creates delay. Proximity compresses it. Even without deciding anything explicitly about time, I would already be shaping how it is perceived.

I keep returning to the experience of very slow or discontinuous music, like that of Éliane Radigue or Morton Feldman, where events feel detached from one another and their relationships become difficult to trace. In those moments we stop listening in a linear way. We’re no longer following development or expecting continuity. Instead, we become aware of duration itself, of presence. Time stops feeling like a line and begins to feel almost vertical, spatial, as if we’re inside it rather than moving through it.

Maybe this is the point where space and time start to exchange roles. When temporal continuity weakens, perception shifts toward space. The question is no longer “what comes next?” but rather “where am I?”

If I think of composing space — whether physical, acoustic, or even just conceptual — then I am already building an environment in which certain temporalities can exist and others cannot. The temporality is no longer imposed; it grows out of the conditions I create. Perhaps this is a way of working with time without having to define it abstractly beforehand. Instead of imagining an empty temporal structure and filling it with sound, I imagine a space and listen to the kind of time it generates. Then I introduce sound into it, letting it reshape the space, and with it, the time itself.

It makes me wonder whether I have always been working spatially without fully realizing it. I thought I was shaping time through sound. Then I started wondering if I should construct time before sound. Now I’m beginning to feel that by composing space, I might find a more tangible way of approaching both.

I still have more questions than answers. But this shift feels important because it gives me something concrete to hold onto. Space has dimensions, resonance, limits. It can be imagined, drawn, inhabited, composed. And perhaps through it, time becomes slightly less abstract — not something I must define in advance, but something that slowly reveals itself as I shape the conditions in which sound can exist.