Composers on TikTok

I was thrilled and honored to be included in musicologist Imani Mosley’s recent piece for New Music USA in which she speculates about the next decade of American contemporary music. Imani references a series of short videos I’ve produced for my TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter accounts over the last few months that feature a 10-15 second clip from one of my pieces introduced by the statement, “I’m a composer and I wrote this music”. 

For this “Throwback Thursday”, I decided to make a compilation of all the videos I posted in 2021, and, if you haven’t seen them, you can watch it below:

What Imani finds notable about my videos is their embrace of TikTok’s typifying, “penchant for virality”, which lies at the heart of this platform’s vibrant meme culture. Appropriately, the whole series began as the adaptation of a photographer’s video concept that has been memefied in earnest and in jest by thousands of other accounts to the tune of millions of views. None of the nine “I’m a composer…” videos I’ve made has ‘gone viral’ by any stretch of the imagination since I began the weekly series on October 25. But, with their 7,785 total views to date, these snapshots of my music have averaged 865 views across three social media platforms — in contrast, my website has attracted only 421 total visits since August. 

I chose to give the videos a fixed format that only allows me to showcase 10-15 seconds from one of my compositions at a time. In many respects, this strict limitation is imposed by these platforms’ specific features and how users tend to behave. TikTok posts must be less than three minutes long, and its algorithm favors much shorter videos that quickly grab viewers’ attention. This is why, for example, I make sure the transition from the short ‘intro’ segment to the featured music happens within five seconds. The book-ending clips that show me going about my day with the accompanying voice-over (“I’m a composer…”, and “That’s it, thank you!) is also borrowed from the series’ source material. And, that pseudo-documentary footage has been really fun to conceive and film as the weeks have gone on.

When I was in graduate school a decade ago, I probably would have struggled to accept that one of the most effective ways for me to connect with listeners in the future would involve microscopic, out-of-context excerpts of my pieces presented to strangers, mostly, who — at least with respect to TikTok — probably happen upon my music unexpectedly. Not only did my composition education explicitly prize the value of sophisticated musical structures that unfold over long periods of time, it also implicitly endorsed the primacy of composers controlling audiences’ engagement with their work. Ideally, pieces were heard in full, without distraction, during a concert. And, the best compositions were those whose ideas were not only compelling in the moment, but also summed out to an impressive formal arc over the course of the work’s entire duration.

Sharing my music with any success on TikTok requires me to accept a different paradigm that is necessarily more sensual and impermanent. If, until my music is performed in a concert hall again, I will draw my biggest audience through musical fragments that last less than thirty seconds, I cannot adhere to the same set of artistic values I held prior to the pandemic. Of course, I think it is fun to listen back through my output and find moments that I think will work well on social media, but it also forces me to gaze at my work through a new lens. I seek out passages with dramatic contrasts, striking tibres, alluring textures, and/or exciting rhythmic ideas that convey some kind of compelling musical micro-narrative in the allotted time. This is the best I can do in a format that does not give me five, ten, or twenty minutes of audience attention in which I can intricately prepare a cathartic arrival point. 

Incidentally, I’m not the only recent graduate of the University of Michigan’s composition program on TikTok. Bret Bohman, who got his doctorate a couple years before I did, runs an account under a stage name that is wildly successful and has nearly 700,000 followers (I have a few dozen). Unlike my very specific videos, Bret’s posts cover a wide range of topics, and lean heavily into TikTok’s algorithm, live video features, and trends. If, as Imani suggests, my use of TikTok signals some new adaptation by living composers to the capabilities of new technologies, Bret has completely transcended our occupation’s norms. Along these lines, producing these videos has impelled me to experiment with a new kind of creativity, and both my and Bret’s content evidence a type of contemporary musicianship replete with many skills and ways of thinking that were absent from our formal education. 

I can imagine the way social media invites, or forces, composers to transform their practices like this may cause some of my peers to chafe out of concern for certain artistic trade-offs; sacrifices that, in all likelihood, center around posters’ inability to control listeners’ engagement. I believe this view depends on a false dichotomy that reveals more about the expectations of power over audiences composers tend to be taught than it does about the nature of social media’s relationship to art and artmaking. Yes, I cannot guarantee that any of the hundreds of people who watch my next TikTok/Instagram/Twitter video featuring 10-20 seconds of one of my pieces will go to my website and listen to that work in full, not to mention renting a score, commissioning me, or scheduling a performance of something I’ve written. But, every week, 865 listeners, on average, spend time with some music I created. In the eleven years since I moved to Michigan, I think I’ve only had one performance in a concert hall with a capacity larger than that.

Even though it was only published yesterday, Imani’s article has prompted me to reflect on and gain some clarity regarding the artistry involved in the social media activity I participate in as a composer. I began producing these videos on a whim, and did not really consider them a form of ‘marketing’ or part of my artistic practice until I posted them to Twitter and received responses from composers and musicians I’ve known for years. At first, I considered my other TikTok posts, which share improvisations I perform on my Behringer Neutron synthesizer, to be much more ‘musical’ than these “I’m a composer…” videos, but now I think they are equivalently creative. We can direct many legitimate and urgent criticisms towards social media platforms, but I believe it is increasingly obvious that impuning their legitimacy as expressive forums is very difficult to justify.   

With this said, my excitement about social media’s distinctive artistic potential should not mislead anyone into thinking I see this space as some kind of utopia. I am lucky that my identity makes it less likely that I will be harassed and sexualized without my consent in comparison to other people who post content in the same spaces. Because TikTok and Instagram, in particular, are image-centric platforms, their biases revolve intensely around posters’ visual presentation. Users can work with this facet or attempt to disengage with it, but it is impossible to escape and that is one of these platforms’ clear problems. For this reason, I would never assign nor, more generally, goad anyone into using social media like I do.

Additionally, the way the memefication baked into these platforms exploits individuals’ creative labor without any direct remuneration, nor clear pathways of post hoc compensation, is similarly troubling. Yet, these systems mirror the foundational inequalities of other dominant marketplaces for music and cultural objects. After all, a few of the recordings I’ve featured in these posts were produced at festivals and workshops that cost thousands of dollars to attend without the security of any future opportunities beyond what you can forge on your own through relationships with other people in the program. Arguably, featuring these recordings on TikTok is the least I can do to increase the return on that investment, especially when the alternative requires navigating the opaque pathways to success that are traditional to the field of American classical music. 

Within the web of concern and consideration that comes with using social media as actively as I choose to, I find joy in the memories of incredible musicians that emerge when I produce these videos. My past collaborators are the people with whom I aspire to build a sustainable and more equitable economy for music. Balancing that dream alongside the deeply flawed reality in which we do our work is an enormous challenge that no new technology can magically correct. For now, I hope, in the way they broadcast my extant work and serve as subjects for a new artistic perspective, these videos continue to be fun to produce and help me connect with people who find value in my musical point of view.