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.
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.
Jesse Oxfeld, ’98, is editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com in New York City.
