In Thursday’s (1/2) Washington Post, Michael Andor Brodeur writes, “There are plenty of reasons to lament the impending potential ban of TikTok … Millions of American users will lose not only their daily diet of makeup tutorials [and] dance trends … 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 Frédéric 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’ … 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 a defiantly unserious place where context, nuance and meaning are double-tapped to a pulp. But despite these odds and obstacles, classical music … has become part of the cultural fabric of TikTok.”
