The following text was written for a lecture presented at the Norwegian Composers’ Society seminar “Composition and Time.” The lecture was given in Oslo on 14 March 2026. The original presentation included several sonic examples from my compositions, which are not included here.
When I was invited to speak here today about time, I immediately felt both excited and slightly uneasy.
Time is a subject that has fascinated me for many years, yet it is also something I feel I understand less and less the more I think about it. What I would like to share today are therefore not answers, but questions. The reflections I will talk about are not conclusions I have reached, but doubts that continue to accompany my work.
The pieces of mine I will mention today are not examples of solutions I have found in relation to time. If anything, they document a process of searching. Each piece shifts my perspective slightly and opens new uncertainties. What interests me is precisely this instability: the fact that our perception of time, and the ways we might compose it, constantly change depending on how we listen.
My interest in the relationship between sound, form, and time did not begin with the question of time itself. For a long time, my thinking about composition was centered primarily on sound. Sound, for me, was never neutral. It was always the most intimate and personal dimension of my work — something I wanted to shape very precisely, almost as if I were trying to create my own objects: sonic objects that could not belong to anyone else.
Only gradually did I begin to notice a tension in the way I was composing. While the sounds themselves felt personal, the formal structures in which I placed them often remained surprisingly similar from piece to piece. Very often the underlying polarity was the same — something close to an ABA’ structure. And at a certain point I began to wonder why this was happening. If I was trying to invent my own sounds, why was I placing them again and again into the same formal boxes?
This question became increasingly important to me, because I started to feel that these boxes were not neutral. The structure surrounding the material was shaping the way the material could appear, develop, and be perceived. If I could create a sonic object, could I also create the space around it — a form that would belong specifically to that object rather than being imposed upon it from outside?
Through analyzing both my own material and historical musical forms, I began to realize that form is always deeply related to material. Different materials generate different temporalities. In that sense, material has a kind of agency: it shapes the form that can emerge from it. As the composer Pierluigi Billone once said to me, form is the space around sound. If the sound changes, that space must change as well.
What I understood less clearly at the time — but kept returning to intuitively — was whether this surrounding space might also have agency in return. Could the temporality around a sound act back upon the material itself? Could there be an exchange of agency between the sonic material and the temporal space in which it unfolds?
For a long time I did not know how to think about this concretely. Only recently did this perspective begin to shift. And interestingly, this shift did not come only from composing, but also from observing how audiences relate to what they experience.
Over the past couple of years, through my work curating the music programme of an interdisciplinary festival, the Festival d’Automne, and through attending many performances — ranging from concerts to theatre, dance, visual arts, and other forms of performance — I began to observe more closely how audiences orient themselves within different artistic experiences.
In many theatrical or choreographic contexts, spectators can rely on recognizable references that help orient their attention. Bodies move, gestures are made, words are spoken. These elements belong to forms of behaviour that we encounter constantly in everyday life, and they carry shared meanings that audiences intuitively recognize. Even when the work is complex or abstract, spectators can still rely on these familiar cues — the movement of a body, the expression of a gesture, the structure of language. In this sense, theatre and dance draw on a kind of shared vocabulary that helps the audience navigate what they are seeing.
Sound, however, behaves slightly differently. Unlike gesture or language, sound often does not point to anything outside itself. It does not necessarily carry recognizable meanings, nor does it offer a stable vocabulary that listeners can easily rely on. In many cases — especially in contemporary music — sound appears almost as an abstract phenomenon. Unlike tonal music, which functions as a language with recognizable hierarchical structures and patterns that listeners can learn to navigate, contemporary music often lacks such shared references. This difference led me to a series of questions that I am still trying to understand. Why is it sometimes difficult for audiences to relate to certain musical experiences? What exactly makes musical time difficult to navigate? Is the challenge simply a matter of unfamiliar sounds, or could it have something to do with how temporal relationships are constructed within the music itself?
Gradually I began to suspect that what we offer in music might not simply be sound.
Perhaps what we offer is time. Or more precisely, particular configurations of time.
When listening to music, we do not perceive time directly. Instead, we construct it through the relationships we recognize between events: anticipation, memory, repetition, contrast. But if these relationships become less clear, the experience changes. I began to realize that when I compose, what I am shaping is not only sound, but also the listener’s perception of duration. The same material can produce completely different temporal experiences depending on how events are related to one another.
Perhaps music does not simply unfold in time.
Perhaps music constructs time.
And perhaps, what we are offering listeners are not narratives or sequences of events, but pockets of temporality.
Music is often described as the art of time. Yet when we listen, we do not perceive time directly. What we perceive are relationships between events: a sound follows another, a gesture recalls something earlier, a transformation suggests continuation. Through these connections we construct a sense of temporal flow. Time, in this sense, is not simply duration measured by a clock. It is something the listener actively reconstructs. Time does not appear as an abstract container in which sounds are placed. Rather, it emerges from the way sonic events relate to one another.
The philosopher Aristotle defines time as: “the number of motion in respect of before and after.” By this he means that time is not an independent substance but something that arises when we perceive change and distinguish between what comes before and what comes after. Time is therefore inseparable from relations between events. Aristotle illustrates this idea with an interesting example. When a person falls into a deep sleep and later wakes up, it may feel as if no time has passed. Because no change was perceived during sleep, the mind cannot distinguish before and after. Without that distinction, the experience of time disappears. So, time becomes perceptible only when events can be related to one another.
When I first became interested in the question of time, I encountered a beautiful book by the physicist Carlo Rovelli titled The Order of Time. In this book, Rovelli argues that time is not a fundamental property of the universe. Rather, it is a construction developed by humans: an imperfect but practical framework that allows us to describe and navigate the world. According to contemporary physics, the universe is not organized around a universal timeline shared by all observers. Instead, it consists of events and interactions, and what we call time emerges from the relationships between them. Time is not a stable background against which events unfold. It is something that emerges from relations.
Music offers a fascinating parallel to this idea. When listening to a piece, we construct temporal experience by interpreting relationships between sonic events: anticipation, memory, repetition, contrast. Through these connections we perceive direction and duration. Yet this also means that musical time is not fixed. If the relationships between events change, the perception of time changes as well. This becomes particularly evident when we consider musical form.
Over the past few years of teaching, I have often asked young composers to describe the form of their pieces. Quite frequently, I was surprised to hear that they relied on inherited formal models — sonata form, arch form, and similar historical structures. These forms carry with them an implicit narrativity, and many students seemed to assume that by adopting them they could provide listeners with a navigational framework through which the unfolding of musical events might become easier to follow. But these forms are not neutral containers. They are deeply connected to the musical materials that produced them. When contemporary materials no longer operate according to these principles, the form can become detached from the sonic logic of the piece. Instead of emerging from the material, the structure is imposed upon it. In such cases the form risks weakening the music itself. The material is forced into a temporal narrative that it does not internally generate.
If we follow Rovelli’s insight that time emerges from relationships between events, then musical temporality should likewise arise from the relationships within the sonic material itself. The form of a piece would not precede the music but rather emerge from the interactions between sounds. This perspective suggests another possibility: rather than treating time as a structure within which music unfolds, one might approach time itself as a compositional material. Duration, delay, resonance, density, persistence, and temporal layering are not secondary parameters. They are the very means through which musical temporality is constructed. By shaping these parameters, the composer shapes the listener’s perception of time.
At this point another dimension becomes unavoidable: space.
As I mentioned before, for a long time I thought about form primarily as the space surrounding sound. Sound was the central object, and form emerged from the way sounds occupied and revealed the space around them. When I began thinking more directly about time, however, I found it surprisingly difficult to approach it on its own. Time, by itself, seemed almost too abstract. It was difficult to grasp, difficult to work with directly. Perhaps for this reason I instinctively returned to space.
Space had always been part of the way I thought about form. And unlike time, space is not something purely conceptual. It is physical. It has dimensions, distances, surfaces. It can be measured, perceived, and interacted with. In this sense, space offered a way to approach time indirectly.
One composer who explored this relationship between sound and space with extraordinary clarity was Alvin Lucier. He often spoke about sound as something that reveals the physical properties of space. In many of his works, sound does not simply unfold in time but interacts with the environment in which it exists, exposing the resonances and characteristics of the space itself. This idea is important because it reminds us that space is never neutral for sound. Whenever sound occurs, it interacts with the environment in which it exists. It resonates, disperses, reflects. A single gesture does not disappear when it ends; it leaves traces that continue to exist within the space. Space therefore does not simply contain sound. It transforms it in time.
But the relationship between time and space becomes particularly interesting when we return to the idea that time, as Rovelli explained, is perceived through relations between events.
As Aristotle suggested, time becomes perceptible only when we are able to distinguish between before and after. When these relations are clear, we experience time as succession: one event following another. But if those relations become difficult to perceive, the situation changes.
If events are stretched, prolonged, or transformed so gradually that the listener can no longer easily distinguish their relationships, the temporal structure begins to weaken. The mechanisms through which we normally orient ourselves — anticipation, memory, comparison — become less reliable. When this happens, perception reorganizes itself. Instead of experiencing a sequence unfolding along a line, we begin to perceive a field of sound in which multiple temporal traces overlap and coexist. What becomes perceptible is no longer the progression from one event to the next, but the persistence of sound within an environment. Time begins to behave differently. When its internal relations become difficult to perceive, time no longer organizes experience through succession. It begins to resemble space.
This is the point at which time and space appear to exchange roles. When temporal continuity weakens, perception shifts toward space. The question is no longer “what comes next?” but rather “where am I?”
This experience becomes particularly evident in the music of Éliane Radigue, who passed away just a few weeks ago. In many of her works, sonic transformations unfold extremely slowly. Sound is no longer perceived primarily as a succession unfolding in time. Instead, it is experienced as a space that surrounds and contains the listener. Time has not disappeared, but it has changed its role. Instead of guiding us forward along a line, it unfolds around us like a space.
From a compositional perspective, this observation has important consequences. If I think of composing space — whether physical, acoustic, or even conceptual — then I am already creating an environment in which certain temporalities can exist and others cannot. Temporality is no longer imposed from outside; it grows out of the conditions that are created. Perhaps this offers a way of approaching time without having to define it abstractly beforehand. Instead of imagining an empty temporal structure and filling it with sound, I can imagine a space and listen to the kind of time it generates. Sound then enters this space, reshaping it — and with it, the time that emerges from it.
These ideas are still quite new for me, and I feel that they are only now beginning to influence the way I think about composing. I am still trying to understand them, and I will probably continue exploring them in the pieces I will write in the coming years. But looking back at my work, I realize that questions of time and space have always been present in my music — sometimes intuitively, sometimes without me fully understanding why.
Perhaps this is one of the most fascinating aspects of music: it allows us to experience time in ways that differ profoundly from our everyday perception of it. Music can stretch time, suspend it, fragment it, or dissolve it entirely. It can transform succession into simultaneity, movement into stillness. When familiar temporal relations weaken, we sometimes feel disoriented. We lose the usual markers that allow us to anticipate what comes next. But this loss of orientation may also open another form of listening, one in which we no longer follow time as a line, but inhabit it as a space. If time emerges from relationships between events, as Aristotle suggested, then composing music may also mean shaping the conditions under which those relationships become perceptible, or disappear. In that sense, composing might not simply be the act of placing sounds in time. It might also be the act of shaping the very experience of time itself.