[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. For the first time ever, the Grammys will feature a category called Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. That said, it won't be the first time that music composed for a video game gets an award. That honor went to our next guest, composer Christopher Tin. It was in 2011 for a piece written for the strategy game Civilization IV titled Baba Yetu, which won best instrumental arrangement accompanying vocalist. Let's listen to a little bit of it.

[video game theme song]

The album that featured that song, Baba Yetu, also won best classical crossover album. This Sunday, Christopher Tin is nominated once again in that newly created video game score category, as well as in the category best classical music compendium for a work titled The Lost Birds. We are so grateful that Christopher Tin is joining us now. Christopher, hi.

Christopher Tin: Allison, hi. I'm so grateful that you're having me on the show.

Alison Stewart: The Grammys announce this new category Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. That announcement happened in June. What did you think when you heard about this?

Christopher Tin: I was honestly surprised. I did not see it coming. I didn't think the Grammys would ever adopt a new category like that. I think I speak for all of my colleagues when I say we're all incredibly grateful and incredibly excited about this because it does give us another way to highlight all of the excellent music being composed in video games on a broader cultural platform.

Alison Stewart: You're nominated for your work on the game Old World. It's a turn-based strategy game, meaning players take turns. For the part of our audience who isn't familiar with the game or they're not gamers necessarily, how would you describe the game, and then how would you describe the role of your music with this game?

Christopher Tin: Like you mentioned, it's a turn-based strategy game where essentially you play a historical leader, somebody in antiquity, and you found a civilization, and you make decisions as the leader of this kingdom on how to lead your people to prosperity. It's a very cerebral game. If you've ever played board games like Settlers of Catan and stuff like that, it's like that. It's about strategy. It's about thinking. It's very historical. It's very true to history in a lot of ways.

It's a game where it's not like what people typically think of video games where it's first-person shooters, you're running around with a gun, gunning down aliens or something like that. It's a very different sort of game, which speaks to the broad breadth of gaming experiences. Now games aren't just first-person shooters when you're running around shooting things. They come in all different sizes and shapes and forms, and I'm really proud to be associated with Old World.

Alison Stewart: When you thought about the kind of music that you would write for Old World, where do you begin your process? What are some of the questions you ask yourself? Maybe what are some of the questions you ask your colleagues who bring you aboard?

Christopher Tin: Old World, in particular, had a very specific cultural element to it. The CEO of Mohawk Games is actually Lebanese, a woman named Leyla Johnson. She definitely wanted the score to have an Arabic twist to it, but rather than hiring an Arabic musician to bring that authenticity, she wanted to bring me on board to merge traditional Arabic music with classical music. That was my mandate.

Given that mandate, I did not feel comfortable taking on the voice of Arabic music certainly on my own, and so I needed a group of collaborators, and I reached out to my musician community, found a number of composers, instrumentalists, singers, people who were really versed in the traditions. I actually collaborated with them. In some cases, I took extensive lessons with them on the basics of Arabic music theory and form. The project came together as a cross-cultural collaboration.

Alison Stewart: This brings me to a clip we can play called I Lift My Eyes. Tell us what we're going to hear, who we're going to hear on this clip.

Christopher Tin: This is a piece, which is a setting of Psalm 121, but in Arabic. It's performed by the fantastic Lebanese singer, Abeer Nehme, who came out here to LA to record with me. She's just got an extraordinary voice, and it was a real privilege working with her.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen. This is I Lift My Eyes.

[video game soundtrack]

That is I Lift My Eyes from Old World. My guest is Christopher Tin. He is a composer. The Lost Birds is nominated for Best Classical Compendium, and Old World, Original Video Game Score. We just heard a bit from that. For this first, this inaugural best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media happening at the Grammys, this year's Grammys.

Your Twitter bio, Christopher says, "I wrote that song you sang in that language you don't speak."

[laughter]

Can you name some of the languages that you wrote that song that I don't speak, that one does not speak?

Christopher Tin: Oh my goodness, Alison. I've almost made it my personal mandate to write choral music in very far-flung languages. I've written in everything, from Swahili, to Lango, to Maori, to Farsi, to Proto-Indo-European, ancient Greek. I'm all across the map here. That's just because I love international culture, music, language, and I find, I don't know, a bit of a purpose in bringing cultures together under one large musical umbrella.

Alison Stewart: What's something, and within that diversity of language that you've observed that is universal about language, is there anything that you've noticed that like, uh, this is something that could tie all of these things together even though they are so different?

Christopher Tin: Well, what initially attracted me to this multicultural approach to choral music is that I recognize that the human experience is universal no matter what language you speak, what your skin color is, what gods you worship, et cetera. In treating and finding old texts to set to music from different cultures, you see a through line, this monomythic thread that connects everything. The problems that speak to one culture often speak to another, sometimes metaphorically, but nevertheless, there's a universality of human experience that I wanted to explore.

Alison Stewart: Most of the pieces on Old World soundtrack are named after an ancient civilization. We've got Greece, Rome, Carthage, Babylon, Persia, and more have pieces named after them. It's a little chicken and the egg. Do they come to you and they say, okay, this is the location, it's going to be Rome, go, or--[laughs]

Christopher Tin: Sort of. In the case of this game, literally, you can play leaders from these civilizations, and so hence, each civilization need a theme associated with them and some music to set the stage.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Festival of Dionysus from Greece. Is there anything specific you'd like people to keep their ears open for?

Christopher Tin: I think it's just a fun track, and I feel like people should just rock out to it.

Alison Stewart: All right. Let's do it. [video game soundtrack]

My guest is Christopher Tin. That was Festival of Dionysus. How do you think about, we have all this amazing, modern technology, yet these pieces you're writing are for a time long, long ago? How do you think about using all of that technology to create the sounds that we need to imagine were from a long time ago?

Christopher Tin: I don't see any sort of intellectual dissonance between the two. I think that technology in a way enables us to do what we do, and it's a tool that allows us to explore sounds in a deeper way, put them on tape, and get them out into the world. In this case, the lead instrument that you're hearing on this track is actually a Greek flute, bamboo flute called a floyera. The person who's playing this is a woodwind player I work with named Sandro Friedrich, and he's actually based in Switzerland. We collaborated on this track remotely, like I would send him sketches of what I wanted, and he would record them, send them back to me on the internet.

A lot of musical collaborations actually happen this way, especially coming out of the epidemic, and you still get fantastic results, and that's all because technology has increased to the point where a guy like Sandro who's living in rural Switzerland somewhere can have a fully fleshed out recording setup and deliver amazing recordings to a composer in Los Angeles like myself.

Alison Stewart: You've also composed for film, what's similar about composing for video games, and what's quite different?

Christopher: At the end of the day, it's all just composing good music. That's the way I like to think of it. In terms of the two mediums, film versus video games, and what they demand of their music is a little bit different.

In the case of films, oftentimes, you want to write music to support the emotion on screen or the drama on screen, and the music definitely plays a subservient role. It can't drown out that dialogue. Sometimes it's competing with things like sound effects. Sometimes you just don't want the music to be so attention-grabbing that suddenly the viewer is thinking, oh, what a beautiful piece of music, and they stopped thinking about the acting or the story.

Video games are a little different. For the most part, it's not a tightly synchronized medium where this piece of music that you just heard, for example, occurs with any sort of regularity over any one particular action. Because of the nature of video games, it's always in flux, and the music that you write could happen over dialogue. It could happen over action. It could just happen when you've walked away from your computer to get a sandwich, and it's just kind of playing in the background. By nature of it, there's more of a disconnect between the music and what it needs to accomplish for the game, and in such a way, I think you find a little more creative freedom as a composer to explore good musical ideas.

Alison Stewart: What did you think the first time someone reached out to you to compose music for a video game? What was interesting about to you to get into this?

Christopher Tin: Well, the first time it happened was actually from my old college roommate. I ran into him at our college reunion, five-year reunion, and he asked me what I was doing. I said I was a composer. I was working in films. He said, "I'm a game designer now, and would you be interested in writing for games?" I said, "Yes, of course."

It turns out he was designing Civilization IV at the time, and Civilization was a game that I played actually all my life. When he said that he took some music that I recorded back in college with my old acapella group and stuck it on the menu screen of Civilization IV, I was thrilled, because they wanted to now hire me to write a new piece, and that piece that I wrote for them was Baba Yetu, which is what you opened up the show with, and which was what won me my first Grammy Award. Put it this way, I was really, really eager to get into video games, and I really wanted to do a good job and make a good first impression.

Alison Stewart: Two lessons in that. One, go to your college reunions, and two, be open to new things.

Christopher Tin: It's very true. You never know where the world is going to take you, especially if you work in the arts.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Christopher Tin, the composer. He is nominated for Grammys for this week. The Lost Birds nominated for Best Classical Compendium, and Old World for Original Video Game Score. Let's talk about Lost Birds as well. You composed a music for a documentary film called The Lost Bird Project in 2012. Are these two connected?

Christopher Tin: They are. I scored this documentary, and the way that I work is actually when I score a beautiful film, the film brings out good music in me, and in this case, I was so moved by the story of bird extinctions, and what this one sculptor Todd McGrain was trying to do to memorialize extinct birds, that I wanted to continue telling the story through music, and it sort of stayed in the back of my head for a little while, the themes that I wrote, but eventually, over the last couple of years, I finally had the opportunity to fully explore that topic in my work.

I reached out to the celebrated British vocal ensemble VOCES8, and we'd sort of been dancing around each other professionally for a number of years. We'd known about each other for a while. I pitched the project to them. They loved it. They got on board. We made the record, and it came out last September, and we're very, very pleased at how it's been received so far.

Alison Stewart: I'd love to play Thus in the Winter. Would you set this up for us a bit?

Christopher Tin: Thus in the Winter is a setting of some lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay. I wrote the entire Lost Birds as first a celebration of birds and their beauty, but then gradually, the birds disappear, and the songs start to take on more of a mourning quality, and they start to lament the loss of birds. The end of the album, basically, the logical conclusion is that as the birds disappear, humans are soon to follow. It is truly an album about extinction, not just birds, and Thus in the Winter sets up the second half of the album as the album about the human extinction. The line is, thus in the winter, the tree is missing, the songs of the birds that once used to populate its branches, and so now we're talking about the loss of birds here.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen.

[musical composition]

We're listening to the work of Christopher Tin, the composer. He is nominated for two Grammys coming up this weekend. When you think about the changes that you've seen in classical music and the changes you've seen in the field of video game music, what is something that excites you, a change that you see coming or something that's happened, let's say in the last five years?

Christopher Tin: On a personal level, what I'm excited about is every time I have a meeting with a new, say, opera company, one of the things they asked me about is, how can we tie together the worlds of opera and video games? There is a bit of a flirtation going on now between the two worlds that's very exciting to me, and it goes well beyond the Royal Philharmonic's night of video game music at the proms or something like that. It's not just like here's our dedicated video game music night, and then the rest of the season, we'll do proper works. You're starting to see more cross-germination between the two worlds to great effect and to great benefit for both worlds, and I'm very excited about that.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Christopher Tin. The name of his two pieces which are nominated are The Lost Birds, nominated for Best Classical Compendium, and Old World for Original Video Game Score. There's so much more of his work you can check out online.

Christopher, thank you so much for being with us.

Christopher Tin: Thank you so much, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on more of his work. This is Bird Raptures.

[musical composition]

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