Sunday evenings have recently taken on a whole new look. This gives us a great opportunity to present the programmes involved. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be presenting a new programme each week. This week: Harrold Roeland and his programme Sensenta.
My name is Harrold Roeland. I started working at the Concertzender as a technician 11 years ago and am not planning to stop anytime soon.
Sensenta is not a new programme, but it has been given a format as part of the changes on the Sunday evening. In the past, Sensenta was an ongoing musical story without a presenter and was broadcast for an hour between 19:00 and 20:00 every Sunday.
I graduated as a composer in 2014. One of the topics in my graduation project was the use of long narrative arcs—or arcs of tension—in music: how do different cultures and genres retain musical engagement over extended periods? How can musical techniques evoke a sense of timelessness? The concept for Sensenta emerged directly from this investigation. The programme was given the go-ahead in 2016.
Sensenta has always been a musical collage—a programme where arcs of varying lengths and ideas from that graduation research intertwine. This ranges from the micro-level—the transitions between the tracks played—to arcs that span multiple episodes. The programme has now been running for over ten years, with more than 500 episodes. You can string all those episodes together and hear one continuous whole.
Everything is instrumental—or non-stop—in nature. It is broadcast live but without a presenter; the music does the talking.
In the new format, Sensenta will still be broadcast every week, but now for two hours from 19:00 to 21:00, and Harrold will be heard as a presenter as well.
The recent death of Bob Rusche has left a significant void in the Sunday evening schedule—not least with respect to the personal touch that Bob brought to his programme. Having shared the studio with Bob every Sunday evening for years—and with our close friendship evident to the listeners—it seemed logical for me to step more into the foreground personally after his death. This meant that Sensenta would need to be presented, a step we had deliberately avoided for years due to the programme’s fundamental concept.
To accommodate hosting duties while preserving the programme’s contemplative nature, it was decided to extend the runtime from one hour to two. It has been broadcast in this format since July 19, 2026.
Will the content also change? Harrold also has an answer to that question:
What can you expect from the new format? The first hour will be more unpredictable than in the past and is free to stray a bit from the well-worn path of recent years. There is also room for commentary, current events and a personal touch.
The ongoing musical story—the segments that are strung together—moves to the second hour. That hour will also feature less commentary, allowing listeners to experience Sensenta as it used to be: a space where the music does all the talking.
This is how I aim to carry on my part of Bob’s radio legacy. It is wonderful that, immediately afterwards, my Sunday evening colleagues will pay tribute to other facets of Bob’s multifaceted body of work. In this way, as his friends, we match Bob’s versatility and continue his Sunday evening presence. The two hours of Sensenta each week represent a continuation of the ten years of the show that have already passed, as well as my contribution to this new approach.
