In the age of online ‘brain rot’, what’s a burnt-out classical musician to do?
For over a decade viral violinists Brett Yang and Eddy Chen built a global audience with their YouTube channel TwoSet Violin. Millions of views and a burnout-inspired hiatus later, the pair have returned to the stage to continue their mission of bringing classical music to the masses.
When Brett Yang and Eddy Chen were studying music at university, they often encountered the familiar narrative that ‘classical music is dying’.
It wasn’t a particularly encouraging thing for two young violinists to hear, but over a decade later the pair have solid data to the contrary. Their YouTube channel @TwoSetViolin has racked up over four million YouTube subscribers, and well over a hundred million views by blending the seemingly disparate world of classical music and highly clickable online comedy.
Some of the pair’s most watched dispatches bear titles like ‘The World’s FASTEST (and most INACCURATE) VIOLINIST!’ (11 million views), ‘IMPOSSIBLE SIGHT READING CHALLENGE’ (4.9 million), and ‘When a 12 Year Old Plays Better Than You’ (7.7 million views), and ‘We Try the Cheapest (and most useless) Violins from Amazon’ (5.9 million views).
It isn’t all reaction videos and rage-bait; whether the pair are cosplaying as Bach and Shostakovich, or assessing the onscreen conducting chops of Cate Blanchett in Tár and Bradley Cooper in the Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, their irreverent approach is informed by a deep appreciation of the classical world they grew up in.
“For us, our mission was always to bring more people into classical music,” Yang tells InReview.
Yang and Chen first met as teenagers in Brisbane, bumping into each other at after-school maths class one day, and playing side by side in the Queensland Youth Orchestra the next (“Everyone else in the orchestra was much older,” Yang says).
Eventually they started mucking around recording “skits and snapshots” of their lives in music. Despite the many hours spent mastering their instruments, the pair knew nothing about video editing or content production when they started posting clips online. After about a year, a short video parodying the violinist Lindsey Stirling went viral.
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Such was TwoSet’s success that in 2024 – in a New York Times profile, no less – the duo revealed their plans to end the channel after a decade of making videos.
“We’ve said all that we wanted to say,” Yang told the newspaper.
Clearly, it didn’t stick. But Chen says the finality of the statement was necessary to give themselves a break from years of churning out multiple videos week in, week out.
“One thing I’ve reflected and learned a lot about is thinking about burnouts,” Chen says. “Actually, burnout in classical musicians is a very common thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen like the movie Whiplash – it’s intense, it’s very competitive. In uni, it’s very common when everyone’s practicing three, four, five, six hours a day to see people burn out.
“I did burn out in uni, and a big part of that was stepping back and realising I have worth as a human being outside of how well I play my violin.
It took a beat for them to realise that feeding the social media beast had created a similar dynamic.
“I think any content creator will agree that if you take on the creation as a job, it becomes very hard to avoid,” Chen says. “Your sense of worth becomes tied to the views.
“And the comments you get – I mean, it’s just human psychology, the hate comments start getting to you, under your skin.”
Returning from their short-lived curtain call, the pair resolved to adopt a consciously slower tempo – focussing less on audience metrics in favour of “trying to feel the actual authentic vibe”.
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“You’re touching grass and realising life isn’t about that number on the digital screen,” Chen says of their downtime.
They’re also hitting the road, on a multi-city will see them play the Sydney Opera House – for the third time – along with the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre on June 21. They’ll also perform in Adelaide for the first time as TwoSet.
“We’ve actually been to Adelaide a few times during music camp,” Yang says, citing a formative trip to Rundle Mall.
“My first ever flat white coffee was in Adelaide,” Chen adds.
Onstage, the pair challenge themselves to aim higher than simply stringing together 10-minute YouTube skits – and despite often relishing the opportunity to tear strips off Hollywood’s portrayal of the music world, the pair looked to the big screen for inspiration.
“Let’s say Interstellar; the plot might be about saving the species from extinction, but the theme might be, ‘Should a father choose between family, or, responsibility?’” Chen says of their efforts to thread deeper themes and narratives into their live show. “Some deeper, almost philosophical, existential, human question that they have to struggle with.”
It’s at this point I have to interject: in one recent post reacting to Dune and Marty Supreme actor Timothée Chalamet’s pot-stirring claim in an interview that “no one cares” about classical art forms like ballet and opera, the pair proclaim to barely know any of Chalamet’s films.
Chen laughs, acknowledging they only recently realised that a young Chalamet played a small role in Christopher Nolan’s space epic.
“For this particular show, we’re exploring what it means to be an artist, and a classical musician in today’s world where social media is so prevalent,” Chen says of their current show, The Sacreligious Games. “Where media attention span has gotten so small that we have terms like ‘brainrot’ … people can’t watch anything over one minute long.
“What does it mean to be a classical musician in this day and age? That sounds very serious – but trust me, the show is not serious.”
As for that old chestnut from their university days?
“Personally, I haven’t felt that classical music is dying – until Timothée Chalamet reminded me of that sentiment,” Chen laughs.
TwoSet Violin perform The Sacrilegious Games at Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre on Sunday June 21, and Adelaide Festival Centre on Wednesday June 24
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