In a manifold sense, music uses time. It uses my time, it uses your time, it uses its own time. It would be most annoying if it did not aim to say the most important things in the most concentrated manner in every fraction of this time" (Schoenberg 1975, 40). Schoenberg's statement underlines the importance of time as a founding principle in the art of composing. Beyond any hierarchical consideration of pitch, dynamics, and formal organisation, musical time in concept and perception is to be considered the most decisive factor of all. This matter implies that a first imperative-duration, rhythm, musical time-takes precedence over all other musical components (parameters). When considering a musical object in terms of a temporal event, it is its own temporality that determines it as such. The other essential "components" of its identity remain important when it comes to the specificity of this object, discerning it by differentiating it in the event of a possible synchronicity of several concomitant time objects. The musical event is considered as a temporal unit inseparable from its own temporality perceived as a form (also temporal). It should be subject to certain criteria (or laws) that in their essence dissociate what it should be from any other sound event, that is, an object characterised by a musical sense. The first reason or principle that should be pursued, in my opinion, and that of Schoenberg, is intelligibility. 1 While Schoenberg comprehends intelligibility as a mode in a diachronic succession of events, I see it as a multidimensional form in relation to an essentially temporal discursiveness. By this, I mean a generalisation of a temporal intelligibility without any primacy granted to any given sound component, as in, for instance, the succession of a complex of chords, gestures, or rhythmic figures, but with a time-organised formal totality. For Schoenberg and most particularly for Webern, the necessary condition of intelligibility is coherence. Coherence may be found on any level: the choice of material, the process of deduction, but above all, in the coherence of musical form. In this chapter I present the development of a critical approach to the fundamental compositional-technical question of structuring time. Computational environments for composition afford new ways of conceiving and working with musical time, and they require new modes of encoding, notating, and formalising it. This situation challenges us to question received assumptions about musical time, and to seek enhancements to its description and thus our own understanding.