Choral Society’s Season Closer: This Tin Man Has Heart

It might seem strange, but sometimes serendipity shows up in classical music. Such was the case a couple of years ago when much heralded Composer Christopher Tin noticed someone leafing through some of his scores at a nearby table in a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles. That turned out to be JoAnne Wasserman, the 33-year veteran Santa Barbara Choral Society’s artistic director, busily digesting Tin’s notes along with her meal. 

“It was quite amusing, and quite an honor, to see someone randomly studying my scores [there],” Tin recalled, noting that when the two struck up a conversation, he discovered that the choral ensemble was scheduled to soon perform one of his pieces in a concert in Santa Barbara. Wasserman invited the composer-conductor to come check it out.

“My very young daughter at the time was fascinated by penguins, so I thought, yeah, let’s go up to Santa Barbara, visit the zoo,” Tin said. “Especially when one of the members of the choir actually offered to give us a tour. We spent a really nice weekend in Santa Barbara.”

More importantly, Tin was impressed by the choir’s performance, enough so that when Wasserman later asked him to conduct some of his own works in town, he readily agreed, despite a busy schedule that has him splitting time between composing major works and conducting around the country and beyond. 

“I enjoyed what I heard tremendously. I thought the Choral Society did a terrific job when I listened to them as an audience member. So I knew that the musicianship was there… [They] were very open to me programming a mixed collection of works spanning my entire career, so I thought it would be a really great experience conducting a bunch of singers and instrumentalists that I already knew were of a high caliber in a setting in a city that I enjoy visiting.”

That concert is coming up this weekend, when, after Wasserman conducts Morten Lauridsen’s ethereal Lux Aeterna, Tin takes the baton for the second half, which consists entirely of his own compositions. The performances also represent the organization’s first choral collaboration with singers from the Santa Clarita Master Chorale and Torrance-based Los Cancioneros Master Chorale joining the Choral Society singers and orchestra. 

Tin’s musical world has been described as seemingly infinite due to his experience in composing concert, film, and video game music in work that makes extensive use of different languages, touches on wide-ranging genres and music styles, yet is underpinned by a clear sense of orchestral arranging and classical music history. His accomplishments include winning two Grammy Awards, scoring for the popular video game series Civilization, and, recently, composing a new ending for the unfinished Puccini opera Turandot, which not only received critical acclaim when it debuted at Washington National Opera, but was then used by ice skater Yuma Kagiyama for his Silver Medal-winning performance in the 2026 Winter Olympics. 

Asked about the nexus between video games scoring and choral music/opera, Tin explained that despite creative limitations imposed by the media product (in terms of length, instrumentation, timing, structure and mood), the genres do overlap. 

“There’s a storytelling element involved, the setting of a scene,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’re just trying to write engaging music. You’re writing music that tries to keep the listener on the hook. That’s what drives me: I need to keep myself as a listener to my own music constantly on the hook. I write my music to never lose my own attention.” 

Tin said that’s what drew Washington National Opera to commission him for the Turandot close after hearing his video game scores. The challenge was an attraction. 

“My librettist, Susan Stanton, came up with a lot of the plot devices that really create a realistic ending, but on the musical side, I tried to be very smart about the reuse of both Puccini’s sketches left over on his deathbed, and themes from the rest of the opera. I wove them together with some original material of my own that was actually largely inspired by Puccini’s own melodic devices. For example, if Puccini wrote a melody in one way at the beginning of the opera to signify the decline of China, I flipped it upside down at the end to show the rising of China… I’m actually incredibly proud of how it turned out. I feel like my ending is airtight in that I don’t think there were wasted bars or wasted notes. I think everything drove towards the climax exactly the way it should have.”

Having the piece used at the Olympics by a high-ranking figure skater added an unexpected thrill. 

“I was so honored that I thought it would be great to help partner with his entire coaching and choreographing team to create something that would be perfect for him for the Olympics,” Tin said. “We were there in person watching him skate and it was a tremendous moment.”

The work’s success also led Washington National Opera to commission a full-length piece based on the life of Georgia O’Keeffe that will premiere during the 2026-27 season. The pair of concerts at Trinity Lutheran Church on Sunday, May 31, won’t include anything from O’Keeffe: Kiss the Sky, of course, but they will touch on bookends of Tin’s composing career. Included in the program will be his first important video game composition “Baba Yetu” and the new ending for Turandot. In between, there’s “Waloyo Yamoni,” his setting of a Lango rainmaking prayer created in 2012 for L.A.’s Orchestra of St. Matthews.

“They wanted a piece that fused together African music and Western orchestral music and they found the prayer in a book,” Tin recalled. “But it was an English translation. Once I saw the original Lango, the rhythm of the words immediately invoked a song structure and a melodic rhythm. Then I just followed my instincts.”

Two other choral works from Tin’s middle years round out his portion of the program, which when taken together, truly represent the composer’s oeuvre of connecting people across languages, cultures and time. It’s a mission that Tin said has increased in today’s world.

“Fostering empathy and understanding is very important to me,” he said. “Empathy in some circles is seen as a sign of weakness, but I think of it in the opposite terms, that empathy is a show of strength – that you are complete enough in your own being that you have the capacity to see the world from other people’s points of view and to look for solutions that not only benefit you, but are towards the greater good. What I try to do with a lot of my music is create an avenue for people to understand either history or other cultures or other points of view with new eyes. I like to engender pathways for people to be empathetic towards one another because that’s the solution to a lot of the conflict that we experience in today’s world.”

Showtimes are 3 & 7 pm on May 31. Visit www.sbchoral.org