Earlier this week I found myself on the ABC Classic website, reading about their new theme. I pressed play not entirely sure what to expect. What came back was something warm and unhurried – the kind of music that doesn’t announce itself but stays with you. Congratulations to composer Nicholas Buc and the team. It’s beautiful (the last chord – stunning!)
I’ve been listening to ABC Classic a lot lately. More than I ever have, actually. And I’m better for it.
When sleep became unreliable in the recent past – waking up often at night, then lying in the quiet of a house (or hospital bed) – the radio and the music became a kind of anchor. Not because it distracted me, but because it didn’t. Classical music doesn’t demand anything of you at 3.00am. It simply keeps you company – as it does at 3.00pm. You can ease in and listen, or have the music therefore as a companion.
I grew up singing in the National Boys Choir. Music was woven into those years. But somewhere along the way, as life accelerated through life and the relentless pace of things, classical music drifted to the edges. Not forgotten, exactly. Just no longer listened to.
Coming back to it has felt less like a discovery and more like returning to something that was always there, waiting without complaint.
The ABC Classic 100 has helped. There’s something useful about a list when you don’t quite know where to start – a map for a country you once knew but haven’t visited in years. Some pieces I remembered immediately. Many others are new entirely.
A recent conversation with Shannon Brown on my Dear 21 Year Old Me podcast brought me to the incomparable Jupiter of the Planets by Gustav Holtz, which I first heard as the theme for Labor in Power – the ABC documentary about the Hawke and Keating years – all those years ago. That a piece of music could carry the weight of an era and still feel immediate is something I’m still thinking about.
The new ABC Classic theme fits into all of this somehow. A reminder that beauty doesn’t always arrive loudly. And that final chord is stunning.
Well done Nicholas Buc.
