You might not think TikTok lends itself to the best of classical music and opera. After all, no classical fan ever said: “What I really want is something recorded on a phone that lasts no more than 59 seconds and repeats itself immediately.” But TikTok does have something to offer – mainly to the intimidated potential listener who wants the music world to be demystified, or a music student who needs to be kicked back into the practice room.
Most orchestras, opera companies and venues around the world haven’t yet worked out what to do with TikTok, or have decided to ignore it and hope it goes away, but there are a few major organisations who get it. They come across as being serious about welcoming new audiences, especially younger ones.
One is the London Philharmonic, where digital creative Greg Felton has been posting TikToks on the orchestra’s account since January. He tells me he has been pleasantly surprised by the amount of engagement it has generated: not only happy comments from listeners new to the music but informed chats about, say, woodwind technique. Have a listen to the cor anglais solo from Dvořák’s New World Symphony if you want to be wowed by Sue Böhling’s breath control.
Solos like this work well in TikTok’s portrait format, while a full orchestra is unavoidably a landscape beast, best left to YouTube. A clip of the LPO’s Benjamin Mellefont playing the Mozart Clarinet Concerto gets lots of engagement thanks to the work being on the GCSE music syllabus, and thanks to Felton’s knack with creating a running musical score above the video. Other clips get you inside the orchestra, like the thunderous few bars from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Does all this sell tickets? Not necessarily, says Felton – one thing that the app’s analytics can tell them is that a lot of the viewers are in the US. But that doesn’t seem to be the point: this is a long game, building the LPO’s image as an orchestra keen to make friends outside the M25.
A few accounts try to be informative – Wigmore Hall has a TikTok of the baritone Christian Gerhaher that manages to pack a reasonably revealing interview into those 59 precious seconds, and if you understand Spanish the Teatro Real opera house in Madrid has some good peeks into the costume department. But most rely on clips of performers, which can be exciting when it’s a new face and they get the right clip. Eighteen seconds of Konstantin Krimmel singing Schubert on the Wigmore account makes me want to hear more of him; likewise Thando Mjandana singing Una furtiva lagrima on the Royal Opera House’s account.
By and large, accounts run by organisations offer the best bits of performance. A few individual performers, for example the violinists Esther Abrami and Anastasiia Mazurok, make social media part of their brand. But household names are thin on the ground. Still, the organist Anna Lapwood and violinist Ray Chen post regularly, mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton has a photogenic cat, and I am here with my violin case open if Hilary Hahn wants to follow up on the mini-lesson she posted just a couple of weeks ago
Maybe that’s the point: if you play an instrument or sing in a choir or do anything at all that involves watching a conductor, there’s a world of tips, in-jokes, work-avoidance ideas and musical Squid Game memes here for you. It’s clearly a haven for music students in search of distraction. The two kings of this, on TikTok and elsewhere, are Brett Yang and Eddy Chen of Twosetviolin, two nerdy twentysomething violinists who gave up steady jobs in Australian orchestras to make a living as a niche comedy duo. Thanks to a running joke in their TikToks, I can now play the violin hook from Britney Spears’ Toxic. Who says social media’s a waste of time?
