Will Social Media Shape the Future of Classical Music?

May 4

Social media has become embedded in the lives of so many of us in the contemporary world. Many keep up with friends and public figures on Instagram, relax to some light-hearted content from our favourite Youtubers, or scroll TikTok whilst we procrastinate. It is a seemingly infinite world where you can find anything, from the large culture sectors of sport, music, and entertainment to the increasingly specific niches thriving as “sides of TikTok.” In recent years, classical music has been no different, with growing communities of musicians and audiences connecting through social media.

That is perhaps no surprise given its infinite scope, although there is an enjoyable absurdity to a TikTok featuring the 550-year-old music of Thomas Tallis, for example. However, this blending of old and new, “timeless” and contemporary, is not just superfluous entertainment. I think that classical music’s presence on social media will play a significant role in the genre’s future, helping introduce the next generation to this wonderful music. The question is, can this new digital forum also play a part in shaping classical music for the modern world, rather than just introducing people to a culture unchanged by its existence?

So, what sort of classical music might you find on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube? There are the professional groups: the above referenced Gesualdo Six are active on TikTok, alongside orchestras like the London Philharmonic and even England’s Royal Opera House. There are also the individual musicians, documenting their performing careers. Tiffany Poon’s behind-the-scenes video diaries come to mind, or Hilary Hahn’s brilliant #100daysofpractice series on Instagram. A third category might be considered the classical-musician-turned-content-creator, who go a step further and produce content specifically for social media. The big name in this space is TwoSet Violin, but other great channels to check out include YouTube’s David Bruce Composer and Ray Chen, and TikTok’s Spencer Rubin and Anna Lapwood.

Why share classical music on social media? All of these musicians have or had established careers (except Rubin, a student of Juilliard no less). It works as useful exposure for upcoming live performances, perhaps most explicitly for the professional ensembles and organisations, but mere advertising is a reductive and cynical answer to the question. Instead, many of these musicians discuss using social media to introduce classical music in an accessible way to a broader - and younger - audience. As Lapwood put it: “people in the classical music world are always asking how they can reach a wider audience. The bizarrely simple answer is social media.” Live performances are inaccessible in many ways, with expensive tickets, arcane and unobvious traditions such as when to clap, and lingering associations with elitism and the establishment. Social media has the power to strip much of this away and let those who’d never think to go to an orchestral concert or opera get a glimpse of the brilliant music and passionate, skilled performers creating it. The millions of people engaging with the musicians mentioned above is testament to the power these platforms have to build bridges between classical music and new audiences.

It is easy to see this through an exceptionalist lens: an unprecedented, groundbreaking use of technology to bring classical music in front of a broader public. In fact, this phenomenon is well-precedented. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the spread of wireless radios and accompanying establishment of broadcasting companies like the BBC and NBC made household names of conductors like Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini even conducted NBC’s very own symphony orchestra, inaugurated in 1937 to give weekly concert broadcasts to millions of American listeners. A generation later, Leonard Bernstein became the face of American classical music with televised broadcasts and a wildly popular and accessible educational series of ‘Young People’s Concerts’. Like today’s social media musicians, the latest technology of their day allowed these conductors to reach audiences who’d likely never get to Carnegie Hall, from which Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast. Yet, in these cases the new technology did little to change the genre’s culture. Toscanini was famously a tyrant to his musicians and staunch in his preference for the European “masters” over any new music. Bernstein’s musical tastes were a bit more cosmopolitan, but the broadcasts still show him talking to the well-dressed children of New York’s elite, in front of a sea of white, male musicians. Both cases seem to demonstrate a top-down approach, in which new technologies allowed the imposing of existing power structures onto a wider audience, doing little to reflect their interests or identities.

The contemporary world is of course a much changed one, though in many ways classical music continues to struggle keeping up. Issues of toxicity and diversity are still active discussions in the genre, as evidenced by the recent scandals surrounding the conductor James Levin and the continued drive for greater racial diversity in its educational and professional institutions. Can social media, unlike its television and radio predecessors, help bring more positive change to the genre? Can it enact a bottom-up, grassroots approach in which audiences are introduced to a diverse, modern, accessible version of the genre that they will come to expect from its institutions? This process is happening. Lapwood, for example, celebrates female composers and organists in her TikTok videos, reflecting this in her concert programming and various projects like the Cambridge Organ Experience for Girls, an annual event in which girls aged 11-18 can play various organs across the university. Hopefully then her TikTok fans will see programmes of all male composers and come to expect better. Similarly, since his days as an oboe student at Juilliard Pre-College, Rubin has been using social media “to de-stigmatize the sense that classical music is super fancy and needs to be perfect.” His comedy videos impress on online audiences that the genre and its musicians can be fun and light-hearted rather than serially serious and intimidating.

A few dedicated musicians on social media can’t change a centuries old culture. It takes a far more holistic approach across the whole ecosystems of power structures and institutions. That is not to say that it can’t play a significant part in shaping classical music’s future however, by facilitating a space outside the concert halls and opera houses to be critical and say: this is what it should be, could be, like. This is happening and needs to keep happening, more and more, creating a vision of classical music suited to modern society, and reaching a diverse audience that reflects this society.

Will Social Media Shape the Future of Classical Music?

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