I remember, very clearly, the first time I played a piece of Australian contemporary music for cello.

I was a teenager, and the piece was Threnody by Peter Sculthorpe. Suddenly it was as though my instrument was a lone bird, flying across a still landscape of red dirt, endless water, open sky. I hadn’t felt that before when playing the cello: an instrument I began to learn when I was only three. I’ve rarely felt it again.

Even though I have made my career from writing about contemporary popular music, hearing – and playing – classical music awakens something bone-deep in me. Perhaps it comes from a kind of nostalgia, remembering my childhood weekends when I would wake up on a Saturday morning to the sound of the piano wafting up the stairs like a home-cooked breakfast from my mother teaching her students below.

Or perhaps it is the awe of it: how notes written long ago, ink on paper, can come alive again and again through the movement of a hand, the pressure of fingers, the whirring of memory. And how it sounds the same, but different, if it is played by someone else.