ABC Classic’s fiftieth anniversary gives this year’s Classic 100 added resonance, celebrating not only great music but a shared cultural ritual that brings Australians together through listening.
This year’s ABC Classic 100 feels particularly special.
As ABC Classic celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, the annual countdown is no longer simply a poll. It is part of the cultural history of Australia itself. For half a century the station has accompanied people through mornings and evenings, celebrations and losses, long drives, quiet studies, hospital rooms, kitchens and gardens. It has introduced generations of Australians to music stretching across centuries and continents.
Then, each year, comes the great long-weekend ritual.
The voting closes. The anticipation builds. On Saturday morning the countdown begins. Across Australia, listeners tune in to hear the people’s choices unfold one by one. Some listen for an hour, some for a day, and some for the entire weekend. There are surprises, debates, discoveries and moments of recognition. The countdown becomes a shared national conversation conducted entirely through music.
In a noisy and distracted age, it is one of the few events that asks us simply to listen.
Looking at my own list, I realise it tells the story of someone who came to classical music relatively late in life.
My number one choice was not Beethoven or Bach, but True Love Ways by Buddy Holly, specifically the 2018 recording by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It is a remarkable musical bridge across time. Holly’s original vocal, recorded in 1958, is joined 60 years later by a full orchestral arrangement. The result is both familiar and transformed.
For me, it captures something important about music itself. Great music does not respect the boundaries we create between classical and popular, high culture and low culture, old and new. A young Texan rock-and-roll singer from the 1950s meets a great twenty-first-century orchestra and somehow the combination deepens both.
The performance contains pleasure, tenderness and melancholy in equal measure. Holly’s voice arrives from another era, carrying all the poignancy of a life cut tragically short, while the orchestra expands the emotional landscape around it. It feels like a conversation across generations.
The rest of my list reveals a similar pattern.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony represents humanity at its most hopeful. Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs explores grief with almost unbearable beauty. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring remains shocking more than a century after its premiere. Orff’s Carmina Burana thunders with primal energy. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition turns memory into sound. Ravel’s Boléro transforms repetition into suspense. Andrew Norman’s Play points towards the future of orchestral music.
Alongside them sit Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and Clannad’s haunting Theme from Harry’s Game – works that remind us that the emotional territory of music is far larger than any genre classification.
Perhaps that is one of the great gifts of discovering classical music later in life.
There is less concern about what belongs and what does not. Less anxiety about taste and correctness. More willingness simply to respond to what moves us.The pleasure is immense.The stimulation is endless.
And sometimes there is pain but not the pain of suffering, but the ache that accompanies great beauty and the recognition that one lifetime is not enough to hear everything worth hearing.
That is why the ABC Classic 100 remains such a treasure. For one weekend each year, Australians collectively celebrate not only the masterpieces of the past but the continuing power of music itself. As the countdown unfolds and the rankings are revealed, listeners share something increasingly rare: a common cultural experience that is neither commercial nor partisan, neither tribal nor ideological. It is simply people listening.
Fifty years after ABC Classic first went to air, that may be its greatest achievement. It has helped create not merely an audience, but a listening nation. And for one long weekend every year, that nation gathers again.
Stewart Sweeney
Stewart Sweeney is a writer and public policy advocate with a longstanding interest in the evolution and future of capitalism. He migrated from Scotland to Adelaide in 1975 to work with Premier Don Dunstan on industrial democracy. A former academic and trade unionist, he continues to contribute to public debate on economic justice, democratic reform, and sustainable development. His work reflects a deep commitment to the common good and the role of public purpose in shaping Australia’s future.