On TikTok, classical music is thriving – even as it’s chopped to bits

The seemingly inhospitable conditions of the social streaming app have fostered a unique community for classical music fans writes Washington Post classical music critic Michael Brodeur.

There are plenty of reasons to lament the impending potential ban of TikTok – 170 million Americans use the hyper-popular video-streaming app daily to connect with one another, run their small businesses and freak out in real time about #drones and #fog.

But if President-elect Donald Trump fails to “save the platform” – i.e. sway the Supreme Court away from the ban by way of a freshly filed brief – millions of American users will lose not only their daily diet of makeup tutorials, dance trends and tense men with giant microphones but also one of TikTok’s most unlikely delights: if not a constant stream, then certainly a reliable trickle of classical music.

Scroll through TikTok for a few minutes (that can easily stretch into a few hours), and the odds are good that you’ll encounter one of the 2.6 million posts set to Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne No 2 – the wistful sigh of its melody somehow compatible with countless expressions of Gen-Z ennui and millennial frustration.

You might encounter the same bracing “Dies irae” excerpt from Verdi’s Requiem, deployed at high volume to soundtrack anything from grim political revelations to sick dance moves.

Across hundreds of thousands of clips, you might hear Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata accompanying mournful post-election slideshows, scoring a mother’s dramatic performance of things her toddler says or making an elephant cry.

By all measures, TikTok might seem like plainly inhospitable terrain for classical music. It’s a platform built on instant gratification and fractured attention. It’s powered by impatience and impulse. It feeds you what you like based strictly on algorithmic responses to your individual “interest signals.” It’s a defiantly unserious place where context, nuance and meaning are double-tapped to a pulp.

But despite these odds and obstacles, classical music – an art form best known for constantly dying and losing its grip on popular culture – has become part of the cultural fabric of TikTok, even as it’s shredded to bits.

I should specify I’m not here referring to American orchestras that are officially “on” TikTok for marketing purposes. Many should be, most aren’t, but a few are. They’re just not very good at it.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, for instance, serves classical-themed memes and back-office antics. The Boston Symphony Orchestra crops longer professionally produced videos into fleeting samples that register more like ads for concerts that have already passed.

The National Symphony Orchestra now and then wriggles its way onto the Kennedy Center’s rather anemic TikTok account: One attractively produced clip of Julien Baker’s recent appearance with the NSO makes me wish the orchestra had its own stand-alone presence on the app.

And while the New York Philharmonic’s account is surprisingly light on followers (a meagre 11,000), its page is admirably stocked with performance clips and dives into the archives – a savvy way of blowing the dust off its institutional history.

If it seems like a dubious notion that 15 seconds of Chopin could effectively cut through the overwhelming noise of social media and make an impact on young listeners, I would simply point to the formative musical education I obtained eating Froot Loops and watching Looney Tunes as a kid. Or the one my folks got when tuning in to CBS to watch Leonard Bernstein host Omnibus. It was through unremarkable instances of instruction and insinuation that we first heard the music we still carry with us today. (Maybe the person in a shark suit dancing to Swan Lake after the Ravens beat the Texans will be some young scroller’s first encounter with Tchaikovsky.)

TikTok is surprisingly rich with these little opportunities for discovery. A landing page that displays when a curious user searches Moonlight Sonata, for instance, assembles a block of explanatory text on the piece from Wikipedia, a grid of performance videos, a selection of tutorials (including Guitar Hero-style animations of the sonata’s notes raining down across a blinking keyboard), and a row of buttons to sort the hundreds of options by category (eg. “1st Movement,” “guitar,” “Beethoven”).

As any defender of the platform will tell you, TikTok’s appeal springs entirely from one’s fellow TikTokers and the ease with which they’re able to form tight-knit communities online. While orchestras struggle to “engage” younger listeners, young classical fans find each other quite easily (and in great, untapped numbers) on the platform.

With over a million followers, baritone Babatunde Akinboboye has become one of the app’s most popular classical influencers, offering insights on opera, profiles of some of its biggest names, answers to the form’s most stubborn questions and revealing dives into the history of Black composers and musicians.

Classical harpist Madison Calley has found an audience of nearly half a million for her jewelled renditions of pop hits by the likes of SZA, Beyonce and Brandy.

User Emilio Piano has attracted hundreds of thousands with clips capturing (seemingly) impromptu duets around a shopping mall piano. Pianist Mike Chen has amassed 64,000 followers simply by proposing that warhorses from Vivaldi, Bach and Saint-Saens are, in fact, bangers.

If TikTok’s fashion and makeup contingent have GRWN (Get Ready With Me) videos, the classical community has its own take in the form of endless rehearsal clips and practice runs.

Young performers use the platform as a way to compile and exchange insights on the music they’re learning. Lately, I’ve been getting into piano student Chase L’s thoughtful investigations of Scriabin and Gershwin. (Also, Juilliard violin student Maya Kilburn discovering the signature twinkling sound of a Super Mario coin tucked into Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.)

And like any well-developed internet niche, #classicaltok creates space for in-jokes. It’s hard to imagine another forum where a reference to Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes could pass for a punchline.

With all of this said, I respect any and all trepidation when it comes to TikTok. It can be a woeful timesuck and an entirely unproductive hobby. It’s a bottomless pit of fleeting pleasures, micro-traumas and ephemeral rewards. In many ways, it’s an abusive algorithmic relationship you can hold in the palm of your hand. It may even be a national security threat.

But the more I scroll on TikTok, the more I see a place where classical music still has a chance to shape culture; where art, music and creativity are cultivated, encouraged and preserved. Before it goes away forever, it’s a resource worth tapping.

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