London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned a study recently that showed 87% of UK children were experiencing classical music, but it wasn’t through school.
It was at home.
From their digital devices.
In 3- to 5-minute snippets delivered by TikTok, the short-form video hosting app that is all the rage worldwide.
The study also found similar exposure through TikTok for 18- to 25-year-olds, a category of listeners that most classical music organizations skip right over as being historically uninterested in the genre.
TikTok might not have been at the forefront of True Concord Voices & Orchestra Music Director Eric Holtan’s thoughts when he curated the ensemble’s “Bach, Brahms, Bruckner & Mozart: Magnificent Musical Miniatures” concert this weekend. But the idea of a smorgasbord of small, 3- to 7-minute long works by some of the greatest composers of the last 500 years definitely appeals to the TikTok generation, said True Concord Managing Director Welz Kauffman.
“People don’t have to listen to an hour to get a sense of what the piece is,” he said of the 11 works on the program, most of which are only a few minutes long. “You get it in five minutes.”
“Magnificent Musical Miniatures” includes motets — short sacred choral works — from the genius of Bach and the serenity of Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina to the sheer beauty of Mozart’s solemn Ave Verum Corpus and the purity of Pulitzer Prize-winning young composer Caroline Shaw’s a cappella “And the Swallow.”
The program also includes Morten Lauridsen’s breakthrough work “O magnum mysterium,” which made the USC composition professor famous. Since he wrote it on commission in 1994, Lauridsen’s song has been performed more than 1,000 times and recorded more than 100.
True Concord, which will have 30 vocalists and 11 instrumentalists for this weekend’s performances, closes out the concert with Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ arrangement of “Amazing Grace.”
“This is a really cool program. I think (Eric) has put something together that people are really going to love,” Kauffman said. “One of the things about this kind of a program, sort of a mixed bill, is that it’s almost perfect for someone who’s never been to True Concord concert.”
True Concord Voices & Orchestra will perform the concert three times this weekend. Tickets, $27-$42 and $5 for students, are available through trueconcord.org. Performances are at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 4, at Green Valley’s St. Francis in the Valley Episcopal Church, 600 S. La Cañada Drive; and at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6, at Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive.
True Concord Voices & Orchestra performed Ukraine's national anthem at its concerts Feb. 25-27 as an act of solidarity with the besieged democracy under attack by Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine Feb. 24, a day before True Concord returned to the stage for the first time this year.
