Christopher Tin

Christopher Tin, a California composer celebrated for his video game soundtracks along with the Grammy-winning classical crossover album Calling All Dawns and additional extended vocal-orchestral compositions, was born and raised in Palo Alto to Chinese immigrant parents. He pursued music composition studies at Stanford University and earned his degree in 1998. An exchange opportunity next took him to Oxford, England, where he secured a Fulbright Scholarship for training at the Royal College of Music in London. There he completed a Master of Music, captured the Horowitz competition prize, and finished with the highest marks in his class. Back in the United States he settled in Los Angeles and entered the film and television industry, serving internships with Hans Zimmer and Joel McNeely before receiving a commission to contribute original music to the X-Men 2 soundtrack in 2003. He also scored episodes for Nova, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel while creating the demonstration track bundled with Apple’s GarageBand software. In 2005 his former Stanford roommate Soren Johnson invited him to write the theme for the video game Civilization IV. The resulting Baba Yetu, a Swahili choral setting of the Lord’s Prayer, earned widespread critical praise both inside and outside gaming circles. While maintaining activity across games, television, advertising, and film, Tin began work on his first major independent project by weaving Baba Yetu into a song cycle organized in three continuous movements titled Day, Night, and Dawn. The work comprised twelve songs performed in twelve languages, recorded at Abbey Road with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Soweto Gospel Choir, Anonymous 4, and more than two hundred musicians, fusing classical writing with multiple strands of world music. Issued in 2009, Calling All Dawns received the Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album, and Baba Yetu claimed a second Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), becoming the first video-game composition to achieve that distinction. Capitalizing on this breakthrough, Tin composed a second song cycle, The Drop That Contained the Sea, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in April 2014. His jazz and Chinese-music arrangements later appeared in the film Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Subsequent large-scale cycles included To Shiver the Sky (2020), an oratorio centered on aviation, and The Lost Birds (2022), a tribute to species driven to extinction by human activity that featured Voces8 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.