BY CHANTAL NGUYEN
Once on track as a concert pianist and conservatorium lecturer, Jonathan Ong made an about-turn and embraced digital streaming instead, via the online streaming community Twitch.
Now, he is ranked in the top 0.11 per cent of all Twitch streamers, and in the world’s top 150 Twitch music channels, enjoying the kind of dedicated global audience most musicians love – his supportive audience community tunes in to see him perform at least 30 hours every week.
At time of writing, he has now clocked up over 57,500 followers, over 2.4 million views, and almost 3,500 hours of streaming.
It didn’t begin with COVID-19. His story, as it turns out, begins like that of many soloists: a precocious childhood musicality (his first teacher recounts how, aged four, he played the entire beginner repertory at his first lesson), an orchestral debut aged 10, and teens and early 20s characterised by competition wins and scholarships. The international scene beckoned, and Jonathan moved to California on scholarship to USC’s Thornton School of Music.
As expected, he began appearing on the international piano competition circuit. But at one of these competitions, he was hit by an epiphany. Observing his peers, Jonathan was struck by the contrast between their intense lifelong investment in becoming soloist-level musicians, and the lack of opportunities available for them to reach their own artistic potential.
To Jonathan, the whole soloist-training system seemed to waste artistic ability, and divert paths to musical fulfillment.
Disenchanted with the soloist track, and searching for musical purpose in life, Jonathan focused on lecturing at USC and exploring sound engineering in Los Angeles. But it was reconnecting with an old classmate, the YouTuber Lara De Wit, that put Jonathan on the online path. He agreed – just for fun – to guest-perform on Lara’s YouTube channel. This soon led to requests from her Twitch fans.
He laughingly recalls arriving for the Twitch stream in a concert suit: “I didn’t know what Twitch was. All I knew was that it was a performance. And you perform in a suit!”
Just a few weeks later, he had set up his own Twitch channel and was livestreaming. After a year-and-a-half of building his Twitch audience, Jonathan was sure he was onto something full of untapped musical potential. He was soon in the position where he could turn down “normal” music employment opportunities. He now gains creative fulfilment from performing for a regular international audience community, with whom he loves sharing his musical passions, phenomenal musical memory, and improvisational adventures.
We had a chat with Jonathan about his transition from the piano competition circuit to becoming a top streamer.
How did your epiphany on the international piano competition circuit lead to Twitch?
One of my favourite music stores when I was living in America was Amoeba Music on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It’s huge! And I walked in and realised just how much music I had no idea about. I was trawling through all these vinyls – they have a massive warehouse full – and I was like, ‘I don’t know this, I don’t know you, I don’t know anything! Wow! How come I know so little?’. There’s just so much music out there.
It made me think, ‘What do I actually like about music? What’s cool about music?’.
I like to talk to people with my fingers, if you boil it down. And that’s slightly facetious, but the idea is that it’s communication; it helps us transcend or escape the mundane or the oppressive. And so I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll focus on that. So if we’re doing that, then that means it doesn’t matter what kind of music I’m playing, firstly. So I don’t have to focus only on art music. And the second thing is I can focus on training other people, or sharing this with other people for education as well’.
So my early life crisis was resolved with this sort of philosophical drive. I started teaching, and I was sharing music and trying to get better.
I mention this because one of the things I really like about streaming and Twitch is the people who come there don’t just bring themselves as passive ears to soak up whatever you give them. They actually bring their own musical tastes and perspectives on music, and opinions on what they would like to hear. And then when you do what I do, which is a request stream, and you just learn people’s things on the spot, you’re actually letting them program the evening. And that programming of the evening is really, really interesting, because then you get music from a wide variety of sources that you would never would have picked up for yourself.
I’ve been introduced to so many different artists and styles from streaming. I think it’s a collaborative circle.
So what’s the difference between streaming and working on a “finished product” medium like YouTube?
With streaming, there’s a lot of live feedback you can’t get in many other mediums. I do a lot of work on other platforms like YouTube and Patheon, but it’s always straight releasing. You don’t really know if anyone liked it. On YouTube for example, most people, myself included, I consume a YouTube video. I don’t click anything. The YouTuber has no real idea if I liked it or not. The only thing you can go off with YouTube is statistics: how long did the person watch your video for; what percentage of the video was watched by what percentage of people? It’s a very blunt instrument.
Whereas streaming, these are people you see on a regular basis and actually interact with, more than just a number. So how does it relate to creativity?
Sure, the streamer is the focal point of the community, but one of the things that’s cool about a community is that they actually have some input. They help shape a ‘circle of inspiration’, if I’m allowed to call it that. I put out things, they twist it, and then I go and then I put out another thing, and we just keep twisting it. And this process of going around and around and evolving that actually builds a thing that you wouldn’t have thought to do by yourself.
And I’ve played so much more music then I ever knew before.
What do you find exciting about livestreaming as a medium for musicians?
The fact that we now have technology of such a calibre that you can literally have a TV broadcast studio in your own house – you’re only really bound by whatever you have the capability or budget to do. And that’s very exciting to a creative, just knowing that I can actually present anything I want.
This is just the beginning too, because it’s in its infancy. So you can see this process of evolution – the nature of art and human entertainment gradually changing. The fact that everything used to be in person, then we had movies and video games and then – beyond that, what?
For the old formats, you had to go to the theatre; you couldn’t really talk during performances, and you had to sit and be still and quiet. Whereas these days, with streaming, we can talk by typing the entire time, you can watch it anytime you want, the customisation and your user experience is really high.
Good or bad, it’s just how we choose to consume entertainment now. I don’t make any value judgments, but I just feel like to continue to survive in a space as a creative person, you should not just follow trends but take advantage of the good points of these trends.
What was your first stream like?
At the time I was like, ‘Well, I know I’ve comprehensively missed the YouTube bus, but I’m not going to miss another one!’. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I started streaming two or three weeks later.
The first stream was using open broadcasting software and when you want to go live, you hit ‘go-live’. I thought there would be a second confirmation at some step, like firing up a nuclear missile.
So I hit ‘live’, and then thought, ‘I’ll do some last-minute tidying!’. And so some people knew me from Lara’s community and came to watch. And what they watched was me pottering around my room ignoring them, picking up things off the floor! It was a cleaning stream! And I eventually came back to the piano, realised there were a couple of people there and was like, ‘Oh hi! Welcome to this mess, haha!’.
Anyway, it was like anything when you first start doing something – you get very nervous about it, it’s very nerve-wracking. And so there used to be a lot of planning. I used to plan out the first couple of pieces I would play for the day and all sorts of things. Now, I just turn it on and play whatever I want, and the only thing I do is make sure all the technology is functional.
Do you miss the “normal” classical musician’s life?
Absolutely. Because that music was good for a reason, and there is a reason it will continue to exist. And we will continue to study that. They are the great classics of emotional communication.
Live performance, do I miss it? In some ways. I did it for 30 years, and when you do something for 30 years, it’s pretty much inherent at all stages of your formative development, emotionally. So I always second-guess myself as to whether I made the right choice. But that only pops up when you see your colleagues’ highlight reels on their social media feeds and you go, ‘Oh, that could have been me’. But that says nothing about how difficult it was, the job conditions, or any struggles.
And then I say to myself, ‘Wait you’ve got to remember that you were doing this before, and you know what this is like, and you wanted to try something else’. So really, my only main regret is I didn’t start streaming sooner!
Did you have a drop in prestige when you changed from the concert soloist track to being a streamer?
I did have a crisis at the beginning; a sort of self-identity thing. I was this supposedly high-flying classical musician and then suddenly, ‘what am I doing?!’.
But actually, it started long before that when I realised there would always be people way better than you in music. And that the way forward in the industry is really much murkier than previously believed.
Originally, I thought most of our problems were Australia-centric, but the reality is that it’s just the industry, because going overseas solved nothing. Except for taking that piece of wool off my eyes! So really, what prestige was there to lose?
At some point, I just became more open-minded about things. In music, we only ever see the shining lights. We never see them once they’ve burnt out along the way. We never see the people who almost were, but never made it.
Has that changed your attitude to the teaching work you do?
I feel like, in educating people to make music, you are training them to become more well-rounded human beings. But I feel like, if I take that approach to my own studio, then it’s having people being able to more casually engage in music-making so they can use it in their social life, and maybe even in their professional lives.
I did feel like I lost part of my identity when I switched from trying to be a classical touring pianist. I got off that bus and there was a sense of loss, but at the same time it is such a difficult level of achievement to attain for more than 99 per cent of anybody who studies music. It’s not really inclusive. A lot of people burn out. Everybody will stop except for this small less-than-1-per-cent that tried to pursue it professionally. And even those people are burnt out, too.
So at the end of the day, you have thousands and thousands of children learning music so that half of one can become a concert pianist. It doesn’t sit well with me anymore. And so now that I’m no longer 100 per cent classical-music-at-all-costs, my studio teaching focus changed.
I’m really happy to be doing streaming, knowing it’s feeding modern general musicianship, which is composing using technology as opposed to just traditional things. I do the traditional things as well, but the technology is the new part and kids are naturally gravitating towards it anyway. So I just train them so they can do it. Pragmatic music-making culturally is a healthy thing.
Before we go, tell us about improvisational training in your studio. You improvise a lot on Twitch!
The improvisation is so my students can play whatever they want in a way that’s specific to them and their personal experience. It’s exactly what I do on Twitch. That’s why it’s so relaxing because I’m not trying to play exactly someone’s notes; I’m not trying to play exactly someone’s style.
Improvisation is about presenting the material through your own personal lens. So the reason why we study classical and jazz is so that we can develop a personal lens. And some of my students take a lot of pushing, but some surprise you with complex things that are actually beyond the classical repertory they’re learning; light years ahead of their last piece in the syllabus! Because it so clearly resonates with them.
Teaching – not specific pieces – but teaching people to teach themselves, and practice the craft without us teachers, is the whole point. So the fact that I can stop teaching them, and they can actually play whatever they want at a pretty decent level – job done!
Learn more about Jonathan and his digital career on his website.
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