This chapter discusses a composition for eleven-stringed alto guitar by the Swedish composer Christer Lindwall. Titled Topography of the (One), this piece may be understood as a meta-composition that reflects on the pre-conditions—both material and philosophical—for its stages of becoming. It thereby holds a special place in the compositional output of Lindwall, whose work has, since the late 1980s, been associated with the practices of New Complexity—composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and Richard Barrett. The conceptual nature of this composition, and its direct quotations from a series of contemporary French philosophers launched an interpretative process that led to a staging that would—as Steven Schick wrote in his discussion of the process of learning Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet—“shape and make inevitable an interpretive context which steers the piece in performance” (Schick 1994, 133). The first performance was to take place in a production titled “Words and Music” during the Transistor Festival in Malmö, Sweden, curated by the Swedish playwright and director Jörgen Dahlqvist. A dialogue was launched between Östersjö and Dahlqvist that resulted in a staging that focused entirely on the creation of a sonic framework for the performance. The dramaturgical means were the addition of electronic sound, first by the creation of an introductory tape part, and, second, by doubling up the recited fragments with sampled voice of the same performer, also creating a sonic questioning of the unity of the “one.”[1]The compositional strategies, launched by the composer’s philosophical reflections, in turn become the source for a series of observations regarding musical time, which we address by returning to Deleuze’s writing in Difference and Repetition(1994).