Beating the odds: There's 99 losers and only one winner

This year's Countdown, its results suspensefully broadcast last Saturday and Sunday, required the radio station's voter-listeners to vote for their best-loved piece of spirits-stoking "Feel Good" music.

For those of us as at least as passionate about fine music as we are about politics, these ABC Classic Countdowns are suspenseful and combative in the extreme.

ABC Classic music lovers make powerful emotional investments in the compositions we vote for. The Countdown is a kind of competition and there is a winners and losers element to it all. Strictly, there are 99 losers and only one winner.

Partisan fandom plays a big part. One's feelings about one's favourite composers are cousins of one's fierce devotions to one's beloved footy team. My devotions to Beethoven, to JS Bach and especially to Jean Sibelius (I have even made a reverent pilgrimage to Sibelius's home in Finland) border on fanaticism (albeit the cultured, informed fanaticism of a true aesthete).

Then, too, adding to the partisan heat generated by these Countdowns, one person's sublime music is another person's nasty, mediocre noise. To have one's chosen sublime piece outvoted by others' choices of mere noises (a mirror of the way democratic elections always see the foolish election of some fools) is extremely knicker-knotting.

In this Countdown's case my first-choice vote, the Ode to Joy final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ('The Choral') was in large part an emotional-aesthetic choice. One has to be clinically dead not to be thrilled and whooshingly uplifted by this masterpiece.

But it was as well a common-sense choice.

Not all great music makes one feel good. Great music is sometimes melancholy and moody, sometimes even heartbreaking, sometimes hair-raising. Almost nothing by 'my' beloved Sibelius contains any added sugar or is soft and fluffy.

But when feel goodery is the criterion (as it was in this case) then Beethoven's rapture-packed setting of Schiller's Ode To Joy is in a class of its own. Schiller's delirious poem insists that we jolly well must feel good because there is so much in this Life to feel good about. Everyone and everything, from husbands blessed with wonderful wives to earthworms throbbing with desire, must surely vibrate with the sheer delight of being alive, the choir and the soloists warble.

But it worried me, as the Countdown process proceeded (beginning with the 100th most-voted-for on Saturday morning, edging towards Sunday afternoon's winnowing down towards the winner) that the Australian people would get it wrong. A people deaf to the truth and decency of a Yes to the Voice was surely quite capable of ignorantly ignoring Beethoven's excellence and of giving the top spot to their preferred piece of noise.

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Despairing, sure the Ode To Joy was an impossible cause, I prayed to St. Rita, patron saint of the impossible, asking her to supernaturally intervene.

But of course my analogy, my comparing of voting outcomes in the ABC Classic Countdown with voting outcomes in referendums and parliamentary elections, is fanciful and flawed (and is meant to be playful, too). All Australians, however stupid and malignant, must vote, or be fined, in elections and referendums. But the voluntarily-voting 'electorate' for the Countdown was exquisitely smallish (just 120,231 votes were cast) and was refinedly different from the lumpy Australian lumpenproletariat at large.

The ABC Classic listeners/voters were already elite, unusual folk, unusual in this nation of philistines in that they were attuned to classical music (hence their refined choice of radio station).

Then, too, results showed later, 61 per cent of this Countdown's voters were women, giving this musical matter a special feminine/feminist bias sadly missing when the whole nation votes.

And yet, smallish and unrepresentative as this Countdown 'electorate' was, these glimpses in this Countdown of something of who and what Australians are doing and thinking are priceless for those of us who love and who sociologically study our fascinating little country.

And lo! It came to pass that this consort of electors (perhaps guided by St. Rita?) not only chose Beethoven's Ode To Joy as the Feel Good winner but also made him, with seven works in the top 100, the-most-voted-for composer in the whole 2024 Countdown tournament.

Overall this 'electorate' did startlingly well. They made the occasional shocking, bogan-brained mistake, for example putting John Williams' noisy Star Wars music at 22 and Mozart's divinely-inspired Clarinet Concerto at 23. Horror!

Generally, though, this elite squad of 'electors' did so well that one was reminded of the idea (a gem of reformist democratic theory) that democracies would be better served if only their brightest and best citizens voted on polling days.

What if at the looming ACT election only those Canberrans who can show they participated in this 2024 Countdown were allowed to vote? By participating in the Countdown they have shewn not only a degree of refinement and culture but also a proper appreciation of the sheer joy of voting for things.

What if it is time to place the choosing of the next ACT government out of reach of the Tyranny of the Majority and to put it in the laps of a refined, discerning, Beethoven-appreciating few? Might St. Rita, prayerfully approached, assist this impossible dream to come true?