Senescence

Bringing together video game music and classical works, Senescence: The Passage of Time is an invitation to listen across eras and reckon with time itself—how it shapes us, how we shape it, and how music allows us, if only for an evening, to feel its passage.

Under the direction of Artistic Director Dr Nathan Cummins, the Woodville Concert Band traces a narrative of time that is at once intimate and expansive. The programme lingers on what it means to live, create and remember across centuries, moving with care and fluidity between worlds, between the ancient and the emerging, the orchestral and the digital, the real and the imagined.

Amongst many other pieces, the overlapping storytelling of Octopath Traveler (Yasunori Nishiki) meets the stark ritual gravity of Dies Irae (Giuseppe Verdi). The Pines of Rome (Ottorino Respighi) unfolds beside the mythic cycle of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Manaka Kataoka et al.) and the aspirational human vision of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (Christopher Tin). Familiar threads from Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab) and Doctor Who (Murray Gold) drift through, reminiscent of how, when thinking about time, we often return to questions of destiny and legacy.

There is a profound interrogation at the centre of this concert: what does time feel like now? In an age when generative AI technologies are compressing creative cycles—where music and stories can be produced almost instantly—our understanding of time itself is being disrupted. It is shifting. As processes that once unfolded over months or years now appear in moments, Senescence gently asks what is gained, and what may be lost, when time is measured only by efficiency. This enables us to offer something more spacious: an invitation to experience the passage of time not as something to optimise, but as something to inhabit, again and again. Throughout the programme, time is not framed as a straight line but a series of returns, recurrences and reimaginings.

We present this concert in Elder Hall, a venue shaped by generations of music-making. We also want to acknowledge that this concert simultaneously takes place on unceded Kaurna Yerta, home to one of the oldest continuing cultures on Earth, for whom time is held not only in wonder and continuity, but also in histories of loss, resilience and care—reminding us that every story of time carries many layers at once. In listening together, we can hold space for both continuity and change, honouring these layers, held in place, carried forward and still unfolding.