Every January Australia’s young and young at heart tune in to count down the biggest new music tracks of the past year on Triple J’s Hottest 100. And every June a very different demographic vote and follow along as ABC Classic counts down Australia’s 100 favourite pieces of classical music. Each year’s Classic 100 has a different theme – 2024’s was “feelgood”, with the poll topped by Beethoven’s Symphony No 9.
This year’s countdown was steered by Megan Burslem, who also helms the ABC Classic Breakfast show. A violist and music educator, Burslem has a lifelong love of classical music. Once, while studying in Serbia, she picked up a special tool of the trade from a local luthier – which she has since lost. Here, the radio host tells us why she still mourns that missing pot of rosin, and shares the stories of two other important belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
I’d run for my diaries. And I don’t mean my current journals filled with adult ruminations and personal growth homework – they can burn. But my teenage diaries, written in different coloured glitter pens, detailing exactly what my year 8 crush said and how they are just “soooooo hot”. The diaries that housed my frustration about the unfairness of life after I was told to clean my room (“It’s SO UNFAIR!!!” with an angry scribble to match).
My favourite entry: the day we went to Dreamworld and I wrote pages not about the rides but each and every morsel I put in my mouth.
My most useful object
Earplugs. I carry them on my keychain everywhere I go. They’re just a cheap squishy foam pair but they have to be the short stubby ones, not the longer rounded kind that always fall out.
I’m a gen Y and it was drilled into us to slip, slop, slap; to brush and floss our teeth but there was no talk about protecting our hearing. Handy for gigs, walking past heavy machinery and when a dad sneezes. To me, they’re a no-brainer.
The item I most regret losing
My rosin. I can hear you saying, “I’m sorry … your what?” Rosin is dried tree resin, similar to sap, and is an essential part of playing a string instrument with a bow such as a violin, viola, cello or double bass.
String bows are made with horsehair but, without rosin rubbed on it, it can produce a strange sound like the soft ASMR version of pulling polystyrene out of a cardboard box. Not ideal for playing Beethoven or Schubert. Rosin, for a string player, is like chalk for a gymnast. It’s the unsung hero, the grip, the reason you get that warm resonant sound.
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Before radio, I trained as a classical violist and spent time studying in Serbia. While I was there, I went to a luthier on the outskirts of Belgrade. It was an incredible place, stuffed to the brim with instruments old and new. It was dusty and disorganised and the smell of wood and pipe smoke was overpowering. But there was another scent in there, sweet and nutty, like maple syrup and butter over a low heat. I was in love. Was it in the varnish? Was it the wood? Was it someone’s lunch cooking out the back?
It was the rosin. I buried my nose deep into one of those hardened blocks and knew it was my future, the love of my musical life.
I’d rub it on my bow every few days, sniffing like someone who’d never used their nostrils before. The way it rubbed, the way it gripped was the secret ingredient to my phat viola sound.
And then one day I lost the rosin. Where did it go? Who found it? Who took it? I ask myself these questions every now and then, but especially when I’m eating pancakes.