Distinguished Concerts International New York expands its collaboration with innovative young composer and two-time Grammy Award-winner Christopher Tin with an exhilarating night of Tin’s music at Carnegie Hall. The Drop of Dawn on Sunday, April 13 at 8:30 pm, unites two large-scale, multi-lingual choral and orchestral works: the world premiere of The Drop That Contained The Sea, and a performance of Tin’s acclaimed Calling All Dawns, whose opening movement, “Baba Yetu,” made history as the first piece of music written for a video game to win a Grammy Award.
Performing with the Distinguished Concerts Orchestra and Singers International, which features outstanding choruses chosen from across the US, Canada and England, and conducted by DCINY Artistic Director Jonathan Griffith, is an array of spectacular singers and world music artists including mezzo-sopranos Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (of Anonymous 4) and Charity Dawson, tenor Saum Eskandani, Indian Classical vocalist Roopa Mahadevan, Mongolian pop star Nominjin, and Portuguese fado singer Nathalie Pires. The Drop That Contained The Sea will also be released on CD and iTunes on May 8, with pre-orders available starting April 13 on ChristopherTin.com.
The Drop That Contained the Sea is a fascinating collection of works composed between 2012 and 2014, commissioned by DCINY and other organizations. “The title comes from a Sufi concept,” says Tin, explaining, “In the same way that every drop of water contains the essence of the sea, inside every human is the essence of all of humanity.” Different sections evoke water in different forms, such as clouds, rain, and snow, and are arranged in the order that water flows through the world, from snow to mountain streams, streams become rivers, and rivers pouring into the ocean. Each of the 10 pieces is sung in a different language, starting with Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral root of most modern languages, and spanning out to others including Bulgarian, Xhosa, Sanskrit, and Lango.
A 12-part song-cycle in three movements, Calling All Dawns journeys from joy to darkest sorrow and mystery, and back to triumph and exultation. Movements named day, night and dawn correspond with the phases of life, death, and rebirth. A total of twelve different languages are represented, including Swahili, Mandarin, Hebrew, Irish, and Farsi, with texts both sacred and secular. Calling All Dawns’ first movement, “Baba Yetu,” was originally composed for the video game Civilization IV but soon took on a life of its own, going on to winning a Grammy Award – a first for a piece of music written for a video game. Time Magazine hailed the “rousing, anthemic theme song” with Higher Plain Music calling the album “a masterpiece … pure and absolute musical hedonism.”
CHRISTOPHER TIN’s work covers diverse terrain: from thrilling fusions of orchestral and world music, to brooding reinventions of 90s electronica, to award-winning scores for film, video games, and commercials. Following his undergraduate education at Stanford University, Tin won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music in London where he earned a MMus with Distinction, winning the Horovitz Composition Prize. His music has been performed by orchestras including the National Symphony, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and Metropole Orchestra. His music for video games includes Civilization IV and Pirates Of The Caribbean Online, in addition to working on Hollywood blockbusters X2: X-Men United and Lilo and Stitch 2, and a host of independent features, documentaries and TV specials. Major advertising clients include Puma, Verizon, and The Gap, and others. His compositions can also be heard as the startup sound for Microsoft’s Surface operating system, and a demo song for Apple’s Garage Band software, now found on every new Mac computer.