Seasonal event 2025: Music and time

In the middle of the concert season, Antwerp Symphony presents a Seasonal Happening in which central themes such as the flow of time, and the tension between life and survival, are further deepened. Theoretical physicist Thomas Hertog, who in close collaboration with Stephen Hawking published his controversial theory on the origins of time, meanders through these themes in dialogue with exciting symphonic music.

Music often creates a spatial impression, but is in fact nothing more than time made audible. And if one thing can be said of time, it is that it is constantly, indeed mercilessly, ticking by. And yet music sometimes raises questions about our linear understanding of time. Precisely because music takes place in time, it possesses the unique ability to manipulate our sense of time. Musical minimalists like Terry Riley, Philip Glass and John Adams understood this well. The obsessive repetition of the same musical motif over and over again paradoxically creates a sense of stasis in their music. The Seasonal Happening deepens this musical idea, linking it to a universal yet burningly topical theme around the limits of human knowledge.