Christopher Tin – so much more than a crossover composer
This is about a Carnegie Hall concert featuring Christopher Tin, the 43-year-old Californian, British educated composer with a Grammy award already under his belt for video game music. The first. There will be more. He has single-handedly made video game music a serious genre.
But, before he takes to a Manhattan podium on a sunny June Sunday to perform his “Calling All Dawns” song cycle, I need to chase off a first-half elephant which had stumbled into the hall. I wish I could ignore it. Can’t. It’s a bloody elephant, after all!
Graham Greene famously observed; “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”.
Sorry, Graham, wherever you may now be. I can tell you that’s not all. They also invented the Swiss Gospel Singers and Friends. They performed in the first half of the concert. It was a bizarre build up to Mr Tin.
That Swiss Gospel choir, trilling out gospel ditties innocently, shorn of emotion, certainly had chutzpah, turning up in a city which boasts authentic, gutsy, gospel choirs a-plenty.
This wasn’t gospel music. It was sanitised, Tra-la-la, Tyrol. “The Sound of Gospel”. Didn’t even look like a gospel choir. The hall was alive with the voices of a bunch of Emmental-fed Swiss softies, in black tie and smart dresses. Their plane must have been diverted. That’s it!
There was a token, weird, longhaired Gibson guitarist sitting lonesome on a stool house left. Had he been at a different concert? Left behind? No, he seemed important, as he was loudly over-amplified. Even got a solo.
Good job they didn’t stray 80 blocks north to Harlem. Their chronometer precision version of emotionally scoured gospel would have had them in the East River before you could say, “Milka Bar”.
My intelligence sources tell me the locally lauded, but too little known, Harlem Globetrotters Yodelling Ensemble is even now planning a retaliatory raid on Zurich. I can’t wait.
When my Collaborator – explanation: this a mystery figure who will feature from time to time in future projects – arranged a meeting with Mr Tin for me a few days later, in a trendy Chelsea boutique hotel, it turned out he hadn’t really heard of them either. What a weird miscasting by the concert organisers.
Elephant dispatched, on to Christopher Tin. In 2005 his signature work “Baba Yetu”, Swahili for “Our Father,” was the theme song for the video game, Civilisation IV, nominated for and winning a Grammy. It is rooted in traditional African music. Paul Simon’s eclectic South African inspired album of 1986, “Graceland”, pops irresistibly to mind.
Song-cycle, “Calling all Dawns,” followed in 2009, then “The Drop That Contained the Sea” in 2014. “To Shiver the Sky” will be released shortly. Mr Tin’s fundraising for the album on the Kickstarter crowd-funding website was a sensational success, The target of $50,000 was breached in 36 hours and eventually hit $221,451. Alex Salmond, eat your heart out. Mr Tin has also composed a series of choral works with orchestra, chamber and piano works.
The song cycle, “To Shiver the Sky” will be set to the words of Leonardo daVinci, Jules Verne and other pioneers of flight and will explore the natural instinct of man to reach out to other, seemingly unattainable, dimensions. Mr Tin likes to paint musically on a broad canvas.
Right off, I acknowledge that being dragged from my Lincoln Center comfort zone turned out to be a revelation. Mr Tin’s music pulses out distilled, rhythmic optimism in a fracturing and increasingly dismal world. According to our political maters, that is. Cheerfulness is a commodity in short supply. Just as there is a determination to define borders sharply and retreat behind them, Mr Tin reaches out and advances. This is a natural inclination – part of what he is.
There is a jungle of new music out there. Where does Mr Tin’s “voice” fit in? Let me sweep a ghastly word off the table – “Crossover”. It unfairly infects many reviews of Mr Tin’s work. It’s a patronising descriptor. A posh person’s euphemism, when they really mean “dumbing down”, making complex music accessible to those too stupid to understand it in its original form.
Don’t make the mistake that because Mr Tin’s music is harmonic, tuneful and compelling it is simple. It doesn’t “cross over” anything. He creates his own, ever evolving genre, drawing from many cultures and styles, illuminating differences, sometime unearthing striking similarities. Sir John Tavener did much the same in a religious context, pulling together belief strands from across the globe and no one ever dared badge him a crossover composer.
Mr Tin’s oeuvre is so far driven by a common, insistent, musical pulse. An hour in his company explains why. He is a man on a mission. While other contemporary composers are bulls in china shops – intent on smashing norms, Mr Tin is a kleptomaniac. He travels far and wide, experiencing different genres, picking up whatever catches his attention.
He is a skilled craftsman. His education at Stanford, Oxford and London’s Royal College of Music made sure of that. He is insatiably curious. That curiosity is characterised by the evolving musical landscape he has created – from “Calling All Dawns” to the teasers for “Shiver The Sky.”
Based on an informal, one-hour, chat it seems presumptive to opine that I don’t expect his career to be marked out by a single “voice” as his compositions develop – perhaps into different fields – opera? He is diffident about that, but the thought was already there. I think his “voice” will defy definition.
The composer Nico Muhly crops up in conversation. He is clearly an admirer. Have I come across him? Yes, actually, his opera, “Marnie,” at the Met last season. What did I think? Honesty – Mr Tin cheerfully seems to force honesty out of you – makes me admit to reflecting in my review that the opera was great, but the evening would have been even better if the orchestra had stayed home. No, I’m not impressed by Mr Muhly’s music. Why? It wasn’t of anything and went nowhere at all. Mr Tin diplomatically let’s the critique sweep by.
When Mr Tin turns to opera I hope he will choose to tell the big stories, as he is about to with “To Shiver the Sky”. His expansive outlook would be wasted on kitchen sink drama.
Nico Muhly is adept at using social media, as is Mr Tin. Nothing astonishing there. Musicians have been doing it for centuries. Look at old newsreels of Puccini’s 1906 American tour. Media manipulation is nothing new, and if Mr Tin can achieve global reach with Kickstarter, why settle for local prominence?
Was the crowd funding exercise vulgar? Come off it. What about Haydn and Mozart’s and Handel’s 18th century subscription concerts? Their problem was they had smaller crowds. They would have been up the internet drainpipe like rats if it had existed.
Being market savvy is something today’s composers need to be if they are to stand out from a crowded field. The economic theory of “Rockonomics” has been well covered by Alan B. Krueger, whose new book on the subject I shall review – once I’ve finished it. Reasonable.
His base thesis is that the changing technology driving the distribution of music requires musicians and composers to create their own luck if they are going to survive. That applies to both classical and popular genres.
Billy Joel said: “Hot funk, cool punk, even if it’s old junk, it’s still rockonomics to me.” Mr Tin is spot on with his strategy of taking his mesmerising sound creations directly to his audience if he is to attract the following he deserves. And it’s working. A look around an enthusiastic hall and the varied audience was proof enough that he reaches out well beyond conventional demarcations of classical, jazz, pop, whatever.
And my Collaborator spotted that the strangely dressed arm-waving duo in the Grand Circle who had yodelled along with the Swiss Gospel choir in the first half had left at the interval. You can’t win them all. Their loss.
For they missed hearing the work of a composer whose musical curiosity mirrors that of his latest inspiration. Leonardo da Vinci. And, Mr Tin is about to make the Renaissance master’s artworks of fanciful flight take off in music. What can be cooler than that?