Frank’s Corner #11: In Conversation With Theo Haber.
Music in academia, homemade sounds, and consistency in the public eye.
Welcome back, folks. I hope Thanksgiving involved minimal stress and enough pie intake to warrant a pant-unbuttoning.
This installation comes from a nightly scroll a couple of months back, where I first discovered Theo Haber. The irony is that, for the first month or so of listening to his music, it was never actually him who was at the forefront. Instead, fan edits of Bambi and The Lion King, even Big Hero 6 (the one that really got me), play as his violin, sung with a sharp tone of grief and loss as we are forced against our will to say goodbye to Bambi’s mother, Mufasa, and Tadashi. But I kept watching, and watching, and watching some more.
“I just wish I had played that chord better.” Haber laughs, reflecting on the trending and entirely improvised audio that, as I write this, has over 200k videos under it on TikTok. His style is unorthodox but resourceful and strangely evocative. The hair of his violin’s bow wraps around the instrument, allowing sound from all four strings to come through. It’s a “never broken” philosophy of sorts that gives the instrument a second life despite its physical, functional differences, which I find very moving, quite honestly. While he assures me he is not the first to play the violin this way, he is still the first person I’ve ever seen do it, and I think it’s wicked cool to see it get bigger and bigger.
Following the release of his latest (entirely instrumental violin) EP, “Leaving for now”, Haber remains in pursuit of creating art for himself and others. Aside from recording his own projects, he is in the middle of a master’s program at Yale, arranges music across a list of genres, and is a painter and ceramicist. Needless to say, there was much to discuss.
This was a super fun one for me. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
25Frank: Thanks for hopping on today. How are you doing?
Theo Haber: I’m good, just hanging out at home after Thanksgiving.
Nice. How was it?
Good. I have a lot of family in the city, so we did Thanksgiving there, and now I’m back in New Haven.
Nice. You’re studying at Yale right now, right?
Yeah, I’m at Yale.
I wanted to ask about the showcase you had in the city with Yale last month. How did that go?
That was great. The program here runs six “New Music New Haven” concerts in New Haven, and all the composers can write for them. The first concert is for second-year students only. They played my piece here, and this year they repeated the same concert at Roulette in Brooklyn. I’ve seen a lot of shows there, so it was really nice to play in that space.
I arranged a song I’d written into a piece that starts as a song and then drifts into an ambient section. My idea was a song with a coda two or three times as long as the song, putting you in a kind of formal limbo. It was really fun.
What was the audience like?
It was a good crowd, lots of contemporary music people and Yale School of Music alums. It felt like a strong audience.
How has that academic environment helped you develop the recorded music you’ve started to release?
I’ve always been interested in recording, even when I was younger, but in college I focused more on composition. My undergrad had a strong popular music program, and many of those producers are very serious about recording and go on to make charting pop music.
Working with them changed my perspective. In classical spaces, especially when I was in college around younger students, people often stuck to more rigid ideas, which is unsurprising in a field like this so tied to history. Some classical students were actually less open to contemporary or strange sounds than the pop students, who would say, “I’ve never heard anything like this; this is weird and cool,” instead of rejecting it.
At Yale, there’s a recording studio with a bunch of microphones we can use freely. I’ve learned even more by running larger sessions. Recently, I pulled in eight or nine players to record the Roulette piece. I set it up that morning, grabbing mics and making decisions in the moment. It shows you that while you can accumulate technical knowledge, a lot of classic recordings came from on-the-spot choices. The character often comes from a conversation between technology and artistic goals.
The resources here are fantastic. The composition department itself doesn’t really teach recording beyond documenting concerts, but that’s fine with me. I don’t need a class telling me bit depth and sample rate guidelines. You learn more by doing, placing a mic somewhere, getting a sound, and responding to it. They’re pretty hands-off. If you’re not making work, they’d probably question that, but that’s not my problem.
Do you think avoiding that more rigid classical music academic path led you toward experimental work with broken and homemade instruments, like the pipe organ you built?
A lot of my musical life has involved experimentation, not necessarily “experimental music” in the genre sense, but experimentation as in “messing with things.”
The flipped violin-bow technique isn’t something I invented. I’m not sure who did it first, but I arrived at it by intuition, and I assume others did too. I’ve been doing it for years because I wanted to play all four strings at once. Conveniently, it looks striking on TikTok, but I was always interested in the sonic effect first. It looks odd, but it sounds good.
For those who don’t know, you also built a pipe organ. That’s crazy, tell me about that.
The organ came from a long-standing desire to build a pipe organ. There’s an artist I like named FUJI||||||||||TA, who makes metal organ pipes and works with compressed air. I love his music. Coming to Yale, I knew there were maker spaces I could use, so part of my motivation was, “I’m going to build a pipe organ.”
I didn’t know how to weld, so I started with PVC pipe as a beta test. The engineering school has 3D printers, and I found a file online that prints the air-splitting piece for a pipe. You pair that with PVC tubing, and you have a simple pipe. I deliberately didn’t obsess over tuning; I just wanted a general sound. If I wanted a perfectly tuned organ, I’d go find a traditional one; I’m not going to build something more interesting than an old wooden pipe organ with manuals and all that.
I wanted an instrument that produced a texture or a “vibe” I could play with and learn from. It’s basically a big bagpipe: the “lung” is a trash bag with a computer fan taped to it. If I keep developing the project, I’d probably build a more durable air reservoir, maybe from rubber. Compressed air might be more efficient, but what I have sounds cool and has a distinct character.
So you built it as something to play around with, set some sound parameters, then see what happens.
Exactly. You define the pipes, lengths, and mechanics, then explore what’s musically possible and how it integrates with other instruments lying around.
When you started filming the organ and inverted bow content, people really latched onto it. As it turned into this recognizable “soundtrack niche” online, what did that feel like?
It’s humbling that it did so well, and also validating. It confirmed some hypotheses I had about social media, especially TikTok. Quality and engagement are almost separate metrics. You can have high-quality work with low engagement and low-quality work with extremely high engagement.
Quality matters to me artistically, but the platform doesn’t inherently reward it. The flipped bow works because it looks unusual in the first second of a video. If I made terrible music with that bow, it might still perform; if I made incredible music with it, it would probably still perform, because the visual captures attention. Once I started, I saw that flipped-bow videos roughly doubled views compared to others, say, 500 versus 1,000. So I kept posting them, and eventually they took off. One of the sounds unexpectedly became a trending audio for #killinginnocence. That was completely wild to watch.
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The music I make is conveniently unobtrusive. It can run in the background, and people don’t tend to skip it. Unfortunately, that’s ideal for Spotify’s mood- and playlist-driven ecosystem. So my music performs reasonably well in that context. Personally, I see it differently: for my friends and me, this kind of drone and ambient work evokes expanse, abyss, or eternity more than just “sadness.” Composers like Éliane Radigue make hour-long texture pieces that feel like staring into infinity. That’s a reference point for us.
Online, a big chunk of responses frame my tracks as “depressing but beautiful,” or compare them to soundtracks from games like Red Dead Redemption. People’s cultural vocabulary is heavily shaped by games, TV, and film now, so those associations make sense.
What’s it like to see those trends spread like wildfire?
I don’t really browse TikTok; if I open it, four hours vanish. I do end up scrolling on Instagram Reels instead, which has its own problems. So I’m pretty detached from most trend details.
When the account started growing, label A&R people reached out. I didn’t sign with anyone because the deals weren’t quite what I was looking for.
One funny thing is that the specific viral sound, a small improv with a melody people really liked, wasn’t something I labored over. When I listen back, part of me wishes I’d played it better. Other clips have actually gotten more views, into the multi-millions, without spawning a trending audio. There’s a lot of randomness.
I’ve kept posting for months. Engagement ebbs and flows; recent videos have been softer, maybe because of the holidays or just algorithm cycles. Despite how exploitative Spotify can be for artists, I’ve made some money from streaming. It’s not a living wage, but it’s nontrivial. So in a narrow sense, the algorithm has been useful, even if I’m not inclined to “thank” the platform.
When labels and platforms are so driven by data and trends, do you feel like contemporary taste is basically manufactured?
These systems shape what people hear repeatedly, and repetition forms taste. Once you accept that, the strategy is simple: find something that captures attention quickly, then post it a lot. Volume and consistency matter more than almost anything else.
Before I knew the industry details, my attitude was: if I post consistently, eventually it will work. I treated it as an experiment, “How long until something hits?” I wasn’t planning for those clips to become a formal record. I always release music, but I didn’t initially intend for these improvisations to become their own project.
Ironically, that helped. A lot of musicians post on TikTok explicitly to promote imminent releases. In my case, people started asking, “Is this coming out?” and the demand preceded the decision to release. Posting videos of the recording and production process also built a narrative.
The unfortunate part is that none of this is deep. It’s not a profound strategy; it’s simple attention engineering. As an artist, you’d prefer self-promotion to feel meaningful or at least creatively interesting. Instead, it’s mostly repetitive posting.
When that traction turned into your Leaving, for Now project, what did it represent for you, career-wise and life-wise?
The main impact of the project is that it proved my social media hypothesis, and it connected me with a large group of people genuinely interested in what I make. That’s huge, especially as a composer from the contemporary classical world. It also increases the volume of “We should collaborate” messages from people, which can often lead to pretty cool collaborations.
A friend who’s successful online told me I’m lucky that the thing I went viral for is the thing I actually want to continue doing. Some people go viral for lifestyle content, then try to pivot to music and discover their audience only wants the lifestyle videos. In my case, the audience likes melancholic, textural music. If I keep making that, or adjacent things, they’re likely to follow.
The big question is what happens if I release something very different, like a vocal album. Will the existing audience respond, or will I be rebuilding from scratch? Same if I write a string quartet where everyone uses flipped bows and document it; that might work, but it might be that people are responding to the intimacy of “just me at home with a weird instrument” more than to any specific technique. I’ll have to experiment and see.
Does it feel like a breakthrough?
Yes and no. On paper, it’s a breakthrough: more listeners, more visibility, label interest, streaming numbers. But in my mind, it’s one project among many. While all that was happening, I was also writing an orchestra piece. That felt like my main focus. Labels would call the ambient record an “artist project,” and I’d say, “Sure,” but I don’t see it as my magnum opus. I may never feel like I’ve created that. It’s one meaningful work in a longer trajectory.
The flipped-bow violin is sonically effective, but I’m not sure I want to center it in a live performance because it veers into gimmick territory. It works brilliantly on camera. If anything, I’d be more interested in collaborating with a luthier on a purpose-built bow where tension is adjustable, making it a serious instrument rather than a visual trick.
For me, a real “breakthrough” is more internal: feeling like disparate interests and techniques have cohered into something new artistically. Numbers don’t quite capture that. The commercial breakthrough is real; the artistic breakthrough is an ongoing process.
Outside of music and industry stuff, what other media or art forms are influencing you lately?
Recently, painting has been a huge influence. I’m taking a painting class at school, going to galleries and museums a lot, and I’m fascinated by pigment, texture, and compositional decisions, the placement of color and shape on a canvas. Painters like Richard Diebenkorn, who abstracts streets and landscapes into blocks and lines, have been especially compelling.
That’s seeped into my compositions. Lately, pieces feel more “painterly”: rather than spinning out a single melody, I create sonic “colors.” I’ll place one texture or harmony next to another and focus on the relationship between them, almost like putting two colors side by side to see how they interact.
You also work with ceramics. Does practicing ceramics and painting affect your music in concrete ways? Does music affect the outcome of your ceramics or music?
Yes. Ceramics, especially, has taught me a lot about process, attention, and non-attachment.
With clay, you have to be fully present. If you lose focus, you ruin the piece. And a piece can break or fail at any point, from throwing to drying to firing. A friend accidentally knocked over a cup I’d made around Halloween; it shattered, and that’s just part of the practice.
When I first started, I was precious about my first cup. Now, looking back, it’s not very good; cups I can throw quickly today are much better. You always improve, so clinging to early work can be limiting. The real value is in developing your hands, your eye, your instincts, not in any single object.
Similarly, my hard drive is full of musical experiments that I could polish into finished tracks, but many of them can just remain studies. They taught me something; that’s enough.
If I’m working on a piece and feel it should suddenly go in a new direction, I’ll often step aside and explore that impulse in a separate sketch. Then I come back and ask whether the original piece truly needed that shift or whether I just needed to “go for a walk” creatively. Often, the piece is better off without that detour, but I’ve honored the impulse elsewhere. That approach comes directly from ceramic practice.
Is it easy to forget you can just move on like that?
Sort of, yes, especially when you’ve invested a lot of time. But it’s something I consciously remind myself of. Sticking with an uncooperative idea out of obligation can drain the life from a piece.
Non-attachment doesn’t mean you don’t care; it means you care more about the overall evolution of your work than about preserving any specific fragment.
Looking ahead, what’s next for you, in terms of new music, performances, school, whatever?
I have a show on Monday at Purgatory in Brooklyn. I’m planning to do an ambient violin set, leaning into the textures people have connected with. On the 11th, I have an orchestra piece being premiered at Yale, which I’m excited about.
Beyond that, I’m finishing a very strange project with a friend, something like a hyperpop-adjacent, soundscape-heavy “soundwalk” record. We’ve been working on it for about four years and are maybe 96 or 97 percent done. Once it’s finished, we’ll release it. I’m also working on a bluegrass-leaning project, and I’ll probably record another ambient record, maybe involving banjo and other instruments.
Here at Yale, I’ve been writing pieces for friends. We’ve built a little community, doing potlucks and informal sessions. I’m writing pieces that I want to play in a living room, record with a few microphones, some friends, and some wine, and treat that as both social and artistic practice.
After a period of very outward-facing activity, social media, label conversations, and public releases, I’m interested in focusing on things close to home and to my immediate circle, while still posting enough to steward the audience that’s formed. Over the winter, I might experiment with videos featuring collaborators or other creators, partly out of curiosity about how that affects reach, and partly because collaboration is fun.
And I’ll keep painting. That class and the time in the studio have become an important counterweight to the screen-centered side of my musical life.
Follow Theo on Instagram and TikTok. Listen to “Leaving for now” on Spotify and Bandcamp.