The composer Christopher Tin doesn’t so much dip his toe into musical genres as splash uninhibitedly through them. A quick-change artist, the classically-trained Tin has marshaled his curiosity into a career with a discography that includes a song cycle with texts in proto-Indo-European, Xhosa and Old Norse and an orchestral remix of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” He’s particularly beloved for ”Baba Yetu,” a choir work written for the video game Civilization IV, which in 2011 became the first piece of video game music to receive a Grammy – an award that speaks to the genre’s rising popularity beyond the gaming community over the last few decades.
Tin spoke with me about the future of video game music, working in a cornucopia of genres and the annoyance of being labeled.
What do you think accounts for the recent uptick in video game music’s popularity? Has any of this new interest influenced the way game developers approach their craft?
Video game composers are definitely seeing more of a cult following than they did ten years ago. That’s the result of a few things: first, video games have penetrated culture much more deeply, and second, you’re seeing a healthy class of small business game development. Games are no longer the sole realm of major multimillion-dollar development studios. Now anyone who can create an app can create a video game.
I see [the field] growing in two ways: first, in terms of the music’s sophistication. As more and more composers get into the business, we’ll hear a lot of new styles and approaches. Film music is enjoying a renaissance – take the Oscar-nominated score written by Mica Levi for Jackie. I think that video game music will continue along this trend and start incorporating more avant-garde influences.
Second, I hope we reach a point where game music can be partially pre-composed by technology that adapts musical phrases very closely to the action on screen. I’ve never been threatened by that sort of stuff – I love the idea of generative tools. Especially since, in the future, your visibility as a composer will be tied into who you are as a person. I’m not terrified because nobody is terribly interested in what a computer has to say about social issues.
A number of your compositions, like “Baba Yetu” and The Drop That Contained The Sea, have an international outlook. How did you become interested in so many different types of music?
I’ve always loved any sort of music – pop, gospel, jazz, rock. I’ve never turned my nose up at anything. I was doing jazz combos in college and also going to raves and underground dance parties. I was really into music consumption and learning how to make a beat. When world music came along for me, it was eye-opening – there are whole concepts like the 12-tone scale that aren’t used in other cultures. I made [world music] a main focus of my output because I had success merging my classical background with my world music background. I’m quite interested in traveling, and I wanted to combine my scholarly classical side with my globetrotting.
The opportunity to do video game music accidentally landed in my lap. My former Stanford roommate became a video game designer on Civilization IV. We reconnected at our five-year anniversary, and a few months later he said that he saw some of the music that I had recorded in college – an African music choir – and played it alongside the game’s opening menu screen for the company. Everyone liked it, and they hired me to write a new theme for the game.
I never subscribed to a particular school or way of writing, and I never had a teacher who pushed me to write in one particular voice, so what I eventually started writing was a confluence of different approaches to music. There was never a time I sat down and said, “This is the style I want to write in.” I never had anyone telling me, this is the way classical should be. I was free to go out and do my own thing and decide for myself what I liked.
How do the various types of music you work in inform each other? Do you apply the lessons you learn from one type to the others?
It’s really a challenge to synthesize all the lessons you learn from different approaches to music and emerge with your own strong voice. The problem is that a lot of the time, you are in a situation where the baggage you bring to a project hinders your ability to do effectively what’s being asked of you because you’re hung up with the idea of originality, or how the piece you’re writing is going to fit in with your catalogue of works. I think that what you find is that perhaps classical composers are rightly fixated on the idea of having a particular style or sound or approach. I think that’s very important. But I think what it also means is that it’s difficult to to let go of the things that you think make your music unique instead of completing the task at hand. For example, it’s hard to do a dance collaboration and not want to infuse your own sense of tonality into a music genre which is very much about triads and simple chord progressions. You’re often pushing and pulling and making recalibrations. There’s a lot of creative haggling.