If you’ve been a long-time reader of OSV, the name Christopher Tin should be familiar to you. To date, he is the only composer to win a Grammy for video game music (an updated recording of Civilization IV‘s theme song “Baba Yetu”). He has written insanely catchy pop songs about love, adapting renaissance and enlightenment era poetry into new forms, in Stereo Alchemy’s sole release “God of Love.”
And now, he’s creating what looks to be the capstone to a trilogy of Song Cycles. The first, “Calling All Dawns,” included the recording of Baba Yetu that one the Grammy award. That album’s theme was about life, death, and rebirth/renewal. The second, and my favorite to date, is “The Drop That Contained the Sea.” This album’s theme was water, which nourishes life, but also has the power to destroy. In both of these song cycles, Tin would select ancient religious texts, poems, and other traditional works of various world cultures and have them sung by groups or individuals in their native tongue. Different song, different language. It was literally a world tour every time.
Now, Tin is back with “To Shiver the Sky.” The theme? Mankind learning to enter, and conquer, the sky. Like his first Song Cycle album, Tin pulls in some game music, this time the theme song for Civilization VI, “Sogno di Volare.” That particular song had its groundings in the movement from renaissance to enlightenment, with a particular focus on Leonardo da Vinci, the “renaissance man” himself, who had dreamt up his own ideas for how mankind might find a way to fly. “To Shiver the Sky” will continue the pattern of using ethnomusical traditions, texts, and languages, and will cover many eras of mankind looking skyward and asking “How do I get here? How do I enter this daring space?”
The extra-big news is that this album, which was filed as a Classical Music project on Kickstarter, has become the highest-funded Classical Music project ever on Kickstarter. That milestone happened nearly one week ago. As time passes, more and more stretch goals are being met. At $160k, we unlocked “Silver Wing,” a piece Tin wrote using a poem from Emily Dickinson, and at $180k we unlocked a to-be-announced piece … language will either be in English or Korean!
As of this post, there are five days until the campaign closes. Do not miss your chance to own this! If history is any indicator, this album is sure to blow your socks off (click the various links above for our coverage of Tin’s past works, you’ll see that I’m not alone in the opinion I hold about Tin’s track record). Click here to access the Kickstarter page and decide for yourself if you wish to pledge!
