10-year-old girl’s melody spread on TikTok. Now entire orchestras are playing her song
.png "“I cried when I heard them start to play,” one viewer said about an orchestra performance of the song.")
When a mom spotted a scribbled music composition written by her daughter, she turned to TikTok to help bring it to life — and got a surge of responses.
Mimi Wallace said her daughter, Olive Wallace, wrote a short song by hand after school to play on her violin, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The fifth-grader goes to school in Chester County, Pennsylvania, according to the outlet.
The 10-year-old wrote about 20 measures of her melody, complete with sharps and dynamics, as Mimi shows in her TikTok.
“Could somebody play this?” Mimi asked her viewers on Feb. 16. “I need to know if it makes any sense.”
Little did she know the melody would reach more than 6 million people and be played by whole orchestras.
Replies to Wallace’s video began to trickle in. Pianists, composers, violinists and ensembles shared their own versions of Olive’s song on TikTok, stunning the young composer and her mom.
Olive is a beginner violinist at her elementary school, Mimi told viewers in a follow-up video. As millions listened to the young girl’s song, they shared their thoughts on the melody.
“I cried when I heard them start to play,” one listener said about The National Association for Music Education’s Northwest String Educators’ video of the song. “She did such a good job.”
“I hope we did justice to your beautiful melody,” one of the musicians told Olive on TikTok. “On behalf of all of the string teachers at the NAfME Northwest Conference, keep making music!”
This story was originally published March 14, 2023 at 11:01 AM with the headline "10-year-old girl’s melody spread on TikTok. Now entire orchestras are playing her song."
