It's at dawn in the bush that you realise Canberra Symphony Orchestra chief conductor Jessica Cottis has a keener ear than the rest of us.
Where most people might merely hear birds getting louder in an unfocused, general way, she notices the subtle changes in sound and the way the light changes by the moment.
"It's the sense of life just before the sun rises, and these gradations of colour as the sun pokes through, and the gradations of sounds of the birds," she says.
Much of her youth was spent on a sheep farm near Canberra. Her father was a military attaché who was attached to embassies around the world, but between postings, the family would return to the property.
"There's a real sublimity and profundity in the sound of the natural world. There's an exquisite loneliness in an expanse of space."
For her, dawn in the bush was a shifting pattern of sound and silence in the minutes before day arrived - like a piece of music morphs and develops to a conclusion. Like the pieces of music she will present to audiences in Scandinavia, North America, Britain and Australia over the coming year. It will be a mixture of the staples of the orchestral repertoire, particularly Sibelius, but also modern works like an opera based on Margaret Attwood's Handmaid's Tale at the Royal Danish Opera in November.
At the northern section of the tour, she will conduct in Ottawa, Dublin, Copenhagen and Berlin, and at the southern end in the Llewellyn Hall in Canberra (at the Australian National University where she graduated). She is in demand.
But there have been bumps on the way.
As a child, music always seemed to be there. She learnt the trumpet, French horn, piano and organ (she said she was "astounded" by its range of sounds). After graduating at the Australian National University, she went to Europe, studying and performing.
She made her debut on the organ of Westminster Cathedral, a vast and magnificent vault in central London.
But at an organ recital, she suddenly realised she couldn't move some of her fingers. "When I was playing, I lost sensation in two of my fingers. I was unable to control them. My fingers just stopped working."
Carpal tunnel syndrome, where one of the major nerves to the hand is squeezed as it travels through the wrist, ended her playing career.
"It was very, very difficult. I tried to have treatment but it didn't work. It was a low time."
She switched to law - but the music kept drawing her back. "It became very apparent that what made me tick was to make music, and it seemed like many threads were being pulled together for conducting."
So she applied to the Royal Academy of Music in London for a conductor's course and got in after a three-day audition. She was awarded the academy's top conducting prize in July 2009.
The path has been upwards since. She's worked with some big-name orchestras, from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony and the London Symphony Orchestra. Two years ago, the was appointed as the musical director and chief conductor of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra.
She is a flamboyant conductor, as the reviews indicate: "The extraordinary conductor Jessica Cottis led the orchestra as a queen. Full of energy and verve."
There are conductors who make barely a movement (Karajan and her mentor, Sir Colin Davis) but she is not one of them - she refers to "the athletic side of conducting".
She has what's known as synesthesia where she hears music and "sees" a colour in her mind. She says that for her the strings "tend to have earthy tones - dark reds and browns. The woodwinds - light blue, light green. And the brass - within the realms of greenness".
Music is more than the notes. It resonates in many ways. She thinks of Sibelius and Finland: "You can hear that he spends so long in those primaeval forests. There's something very dark with his interaction with those northern climes. This darkness, and those mysterious and immensely powerful experiences."
Apart from the injury which halted her career as a professional organist and turned her towards conducting, she has had one other dark experience. In December 2020 in London, she was attacked in broad daylight by a gang of boys. They punched her face, breaking her nose, and threw a bottle at her head, giving her concussion.
"It was very vicious," she said, "They were total strangers, totally unprovoked.
"It was just so random. I was just going out for a walk on a lovely day, having a lovely time," she said. They set about her.
"I resisted very strongly and confronted them and that caused more aggression."
She wasn't robbed - it wasn't about money. She thinks it was an attack "for entertainment, out of boredom".
"I shouted at them and chased after them, and off they went."
The men escaped and she was left injured. "I had such a splitting pain in my head," she said.
She recovered physically and doesn't think she suffers any long-term psychological damage, though she did say: "The next couple of months, I couldn't stop sleeping."
Music eventually helped: "I listened to quite a lot of Bach, quite a lot of Wagner."
She feels her eyes were opened to the fact that people could use the pain of another person "for entertainment".
"I think it's very sad that there can be that kind of violence. There was absolutely no point in it."
Today, she is grateful that it wasn't worse. She is not a dweller on the past.
And the future beckons. She says she is not ambitious for fame: "It's not a driver for me". But she is ambitious "to go places where you can make music to the best possible level".
And two of her heroes are George Szell and Sir John Barbirolli because they shaped lesser-known orchestras (the Cleveland and the Halle) into great ensembles.
Might the Canberra Symphony Orchestra follow?
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