...that topic

I have a draft blog item that's now over a year old about how a composer comes to decide on the duration of a piece of music. The same topic is now receiving a healthy discussion over at Sequenza21's Composers' Forum. My item has remained in draft form because, honestly, I haven't figured out a way to talk about it without falling into language (length, density, duration etc.) that is inevitably more or less suggestive of concerns other than music. So let me leave it at this: the relationship between the the character and number of musical materials and the duration and pace of the context in which those materials appear, whether intuitive or calculated, is perhaps the most personal decision a composer can bring to her/his work and a telling mark of his/her own musicality.