Christopher Tin – A Celebration of Humanity
By: Jomar Cruz
Christopher Tin is a Grammy Award-winning American composer of symphonic works, choral anthems, and video game scores. For the video game series Civilization, he composed the opening themes for the fourth, sixth, and seventh entries. Tin’s themes for each game: Baba Yetu, Sogno di Volare (Dream of Flight), and Live Gloriously respectively, are rousing, anthemic musical representations of humanity and have unified both fans of the game series and listeners of classical music.
The theme Baba Yetu is a Swahili setting of The Lord’s Prayer which Tin wrote in 2005. It has since become a modern choral standard, and one of the most frequently performed choir pieces around the world by groups ranging from high school ensembles to the Vatican! It was also the first piece of music composed for a video game to ever win a Grammy Award, adding a new entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Sogno di Volare has become quite the popular short piece here on KCME, as I often feature it on my programs. It’s a setting of a quote by Leonardo Da Vinci, “For once you have tasted flight, you shall forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you shall always long to return.” Both the lyrics and soaring orchestration evoke a grand sense of exploration, both physically and intellectually.
Finally, we arrive at Live Gloriously. If Baba Yetu rejoiced in the togetherness of faith, and Sogno di Volare laid bare our deepest endeavors, then Live Gloriously represents our tenacity as a species and that, historically, we have achieved a great deal. For the lyrics, Tin wove an incredible theme using four ancient languages from different texts: Ancient Greek in The Iliad, Old English in Beowulf, K’iche’ in Popol Vuh, and Sanskrit in Ramayana. It also has one of my favorite orchestral build-ups into a restatement of the main theme towards the end of the piece.
Great music can bring us together in worrying times, so I hope you get a chance to listen to these themes and other wonderful music by Christopher Tin soon here on KCME.
