Canberra is the classical music capital of Australia. In a 2024 GfK survey ABC Classic had an 11.2% share of audience. If you were to tell breakfast host Megan Burslem that’s because it’s filled with politicians, public servants and pretentious people, she’d go adagio on your arse.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Megan Burslem (@meganburslem)

So would I.

Wherever you are in Australia, you can find ABC Classic on your regular FM dial and/or DAB+. It is Channel 27 and freely accessibly on your TV as well as online plus via the ABC listen app when you are out and about or very far from home.

It is truly the national and accessible radio station (alongside triple j and RN) and Megan, Dr Megan Burslem with her PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology, the perfect voice and ambassador for the genre, which is in the end, as Megan says, ‘just music’.

I asked her to tell me about her PhD and it, at it’s heart, is what Megan embodies everyday at work. It seeks to show the value of music education to students right up to tertiary – how it benefits our connection with each other, mental health and capacity to learn other things.

My totally unwarranted fear upon meeting Megan was that she’d show up my lack of nuanced classical music knowledge. I am (now) an enthusiastic fan, but my dear mother, a trained soprano, would pick apart both my and most of the music I listened to’s diction, and so I rebelled by shutting my own heart to what she sang and enjoyed as well.

I remember clearly the moment the door opened again. I was at Uni and housesitting. They had an unbelievable sound system and I chose a classical compilation because no one was around as a witness. It was the Bach piece above that made me feel like I’d finally come home. I was safe.

I told Megan this story and she said,

“You can just simply enjoy it. No one comes to you and asks you to interpret the chord progression of the middle stanza of Beyonce. You can take from it exactly what you like and what it makes you feel.”

This year is ABC Classic’s 50th anniversary. It commenced on January 24, 1976 and later was the public broadcaster’s first foray into FM – becoming ABC Classic FM in 1994. It once had as many as 60 staff looking after the music, content and concerts that were part of the station but now it’s less than 10.

You may not think it, indeed I had several assumptions dispelled upon talking with Megan, but ABC Classic is a huge supporter of local performance and composition. In 2018, 329 different Australian composers were heard. Around half of the music played is performed by Australian musicians.

Since 2001, ABC Classic has annually held Classic 100 Countdowns, voted by the public and across themes from ABC Classic 100: Piano in 2025 (Beethoven‘s Fifth Piano Concerto, The Emperor was No 1) to favourite instruments (the cello won). The inaugural countdown was simply The Classic 100 – and in part a tribute to that, this year’s is ABC Classic 100: The Greatest of All Time.

The Classic 100 archive is here: https://www.abc.net.au/classic/classic100/archive/

Voting has closed and it will be counted down this weekend, Saturday 6 June and Sunday 7 June, from 10am-6pm.

Discussions about the songs we had voted for, feedback from listeners and even from famous guests (Megan recently met Jeff Goldblum, main picture – she was so thrilled to sneak in a slow dance with him, Jeff is better known as an actor but is also a jazz pianist and was recently in Australia for an orchestra tour) was filled with laughter, lightbulb moments and even tears.

Megan’s selection above is a beautiful reflection of the enormous scope of classical music. Three are Australian composers, one Indigenous (Gurrumul), one female (Elena Kats-Chernin) and one only released in the last couple of years (Lachlan Skipworth). There’s the very, very old (O Ecclesia dates back to around 1151), a nod to the movies (Ennio Morricone), traditional tunes (Danny Boy) and to the composers we all know (Mozart).

Then there is Krzysztof Penderecki‘s Threnody to the victims of Hiroshima.

Somewhere in our conversation I said to Megan that classical music was calming and she, with the greatest of respect, disagreed.

“Classical music has been experimental for centuries in so many different ways. There is classical music that is just completely abusive to your ears, prickly and jarring and dissonant.

The Threnody to the victims of Hiroshima is strings going for 15 minutes representing the bomb and its the aftermath. It’s full on, but also art.

I would encourage you and anyone else to think about classical music like painting for example.

You wouldn’t say, oh, paintings are beautiful. They’re all beautiful! They’re all calm and gorgeous and lovely to look at because they’re not. You just get the whole range that is human expression.

Classical music is human expression, it can be anything you like. It can be a Picasso through to a Monet, through to the most weird slop of paint through to the most beautiful kind of Albert Namatjira.“

Later that night I went to listen to Penderecki. I discovered that a threnody is a wailing ode, song, hymn or poem of mourning performed as a memorial to the dead. I have included the piece below. I feel I am still holding my breath over it.

I think that I said sorry after Megan’s incredibly vivid description above changed everything I thought about not just classical music, but music in general.

She replied:

“I just want everyone to stop apologising and just be in the space and be in the world and hear these sounds just like you would go into a gallery and go, that’s weird. I don’t know about that one, but I love that one.

If you like it and it resonates with you and it feels good or teaches you something that’s what art is about. It’s asking us to reflect, to think about what we feel and to get in touch with what we feel in our body. And if that’s beauty and calm and tranquility and acceptance, or anger and fear and aggression and grief, it’s all art.

It’s a human telling another human a story.”

Then Megan lightened this profound experience by saying something like threnodies not being ideal over your breakfast cornflakes and we laughed and moved on.

On reflection I feel that Megan is like music herself. She has the capacity for childlike wonder, joy and pleasure in a connection over music, gaming, film or dogs. But she also can hold space for the big crescendos and deep explorations of feelings. It delighted me that when she would talk of performance she unwittingly would play an imaginary viola, the instrument that she was trained in. A song is in her very soul.

Megan doesn’t know what will come out on top on this weekend’s countdown, but thinks there will be something essentially Australian to the highest votes. After the countdown, on Saturday June 27, is the fourth ABC Classic 100 in Concert, on ABC TV and ABC iview at 7:30pm. She is host, alongside Jeremy Fernandez, and the concert will be performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with Principal Guest Conductor Benjamin Northey.

I encourage you to follow Megan on social media for another fun entry to classical music. She makes playlists, the latest based on the Sims Buy Mode. The King’s Singers even created a personalised intro to her breakfast show!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Megan Burslem (@meganburslem)

This weekend turn on ABC Classic Greatest of All Time on your radio, TV, phone or however you want to listen along. I hope it holds a space, opens a door and makes you feel something too.

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo. Her Greatest of All Time votes below.

Related stories: