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KEY FACTOR: Persistence worked;
nine composers answered Tin’s call for mentors.
Thad Russell |
Some parts of moviemaking
are so unglamorous that their Academy Awards are shunted
off to a separate, untelevised ceremony. Others, like
writing and scoring the music, are deemed worthy of
the main event but aren’t glam enough to get much
media attention. Christopher Tin is an up-and-coming
film composer; he’s learned that it’s hard
work and largely under the radar.
Tin, ’98, MA ’99, explains that it’s
not enough to have a gift for orchestral composition.
He also must be able to work around the constraints
of any given movie. “When you’re a recording
artist and writing symphonies, outside of record-label
pressures and market pressures, you’re your own
artist and the music is the end-all,” he muses
one afternoon at home in Los Angeles. “Here, if
the music is too loud, they’re going to take it
out. If it obscures the dialogue, they’re going
to mix it down. If it’s too emotional, they’ll
throw out your score and hire someone else to do it.
You’re always scoring around the picture.”
Film scoring is also a precise technical process: music
has to match the timing of what’s happening onscreen.
“That’s why we have all this equipment,”
Tin says, showing me his elaborate setup of computers,
mixers, keyboards, monitors and assorted doodads. “I
can tie things to the frame to within a thousandth of
a second.”
Tin must synchronize with studio execs, too, and sometimes
schedules are “ridiculous,” he says. “If
you have six weeks to write 70 minutes of music, that’s
considered good.” There’s a story about
Max Steiner, one of the great composers of Hollywood’s
Golden Age, who was being rushed by producer David O.
Selznick to write the famous music for Gone with
the Wind—while he was composing for three
other films. Steiner pulled 20-hour days, enabled by
daily thyroid-extract injections and vitamin B-12 shots.
Life is less demanding for Tin. He lives and works
in a light-filled, airy condo just blocks from the beach
in Santa Monica. On the day I met him, he answered the
door looking very California cool: close-cropped hair,
a pink vintage-type shirt left open a few buttons at
the neck, blue jeans and sandals. The condo is typecast
as the home of a music professional: an upright piano
and stand-up bass grace the living room, a large Roy
Lichtenstein print hangs over the couch, and the apartment’s
second bedroom is done up as a studio, with soundproofing
tiles, the high-tech equipment, and a few guitars lying
around.
Tin is still just starting out—he got his first
screen credit in X2: X-Men United last year—but
it’s taken a few years, some good luck and a lot
of work to get this far. “I started composing
when I was 17; one of the first things I did was a musical,”
he says. It was “pretentious,” he admits,
“a two-hour dissertation on the merits of being
an artist versus being an entertainer.” During
the show’s three-night run, Tin noticed that people
seemed to like the music if not the story. Maybe there’s
something to this composing business, he thought.
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‘The industry is a
series of hills you have to climb over. The first
one is the biggest.’
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Tin kept composing on the Farm, where he double-majored
in music and English and got a master’s in film
theory. “I took all the [music] theory classes,
and I loved them all,” he says, “but, truth
be told, I was a pretty shitty composer at Stanford.”
Still, he adds, “You have to write a certain amount
of bad music before you can get to being a good composer.”
Tin directed the a cappella group Talisman, played in
Stanford Taiko and conducted the Ram’s Head production
of Jesus Christ Superstar and the Savoyards’
Mikado. Just before leaving campus, he wrote
the music for a University promotional video, his first
paid gig.
After graduation, Tin headed to London on a Fulbright
scholarship and spent a year and a half in the film-scoring
program at the Royal College of Music. “That’s
when I really became a confident composer, and that’s
when I started calling myself a composer,” he
says. With good reason: he won the college’s Horovitz
composition prize and was commissioned by the U.S. Embassy
to write his string quartet Lacrymosa.
Then he struck out for Los Angeles. The first year,
“I was doing shorts, low-budget anything, making
no money.” Tin realized he’d have to be
more aggressive. On a trip back to London he met the
head of the Fulbright Commission, which by then had
started a mentorship program, and asked if something
similar could be arranged for him. The commission obliged
with what Tin calls a “very generic” letter
of recommendation. Returning to L.A., Tin sent would-you-help-me
packets to a range of top film composers. He included
the Fulbright reference, his transcript from the Royal
College of Music and a cover letter asking if they’d
be willing to talk with him. Nine composers replied.
Tin networked hard—follow-up notes, Christmas
cards, keeping in touch generally—and ultimately
enjoyed close mentoring relationships with five professionals.
First he interned with Hans Zimmer, the composer for
The Lion King and Gladiator. Soon
Joel McNeely, who was working on Uptown Girls,
offered work on three movies he was scoring. Tin still
wasn’t composing his own music, but he prepared
the MIDI demos—electronically generated previews
of new compositions, made before a live orchestra is
hired for thousands of dollars a day—for Disney’s
Mulan 2.
Then John Ottman, with whom Tin had kept in touch for
a year, sought help on X-Men 2. “Want
to write some music for it?” he asked Tin.
Tin did. He worked as an orchestrator, converting Ottman’s
sketches for background music into a written orchestral
score. Tin also wrote some of the “source music,”
which is integral to the movie itself. For example,
the song listings at the end of the film include “
‘TV News Theme’ by Christopher Tin.”
If it wasn’t glamorous work, it finally got Tin
into the Internet Movie Database. “The industry
is a series of hills you have to climb over,”
he muses. “The first one is the biggest; it took
me more than a year and half and a really fortuitous
set of circumstances to break in.”
The next hill is doing his own composing. In September,
he wrote 23 minutes of music for a New York Times Television/Discovery
Channel documentary on various Martin Luther King boulevards
throughout the country, and he recently finished another
documentary about the war on terror for PBS and a German
broadcaster. Tin also wrote demo music for Apple’s
new Garage Band software.
Tin cites composers Thomas Newman, who received an
Oscar nomination this year for Finding Nemo
and whose credits include American Beauty and
In the Bedroom, and Elliott Goldenthal (Oscar
winner for Frida), especially his Interview
with the Vampire score, among his favorites. He
admires the “unique sound combinations”
and “ambiguity” of Newman, and describes
Goldenthal as someone who is “uncompromisingly
avant-garde and has a stellar command of the orchestra.”
As for his own aspirations, Tin says, “In the
past, I wanted to do the big summer blockbusters. But
lately, I’m really attracted by what independent
cinema has to offer.” One attraction: during the
winter he got to score The Lodge, an independent
film produced in Luxembourg.
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