Christopher Tin on the Preliminary Grammy Ballot!

I got an interesting email last Friday, from a New Age pianist named Michael Dulin last Friday. It read like this:

"Hi Christopher,

Congratulations on making it to the first ballot of the Grammy Awards for your song, Civilization IV Medley. I wish you the best of luck. You certainly deserve a place at the big table this year!"

My response was: "Huh?"

Upon further investigation, I discovered that indeed, in one form or another, I was listed not once but TWICE on the Preliminary Grammy Ballot for the 51st Grammy Awards:

Best Song Written For Film/TV/Visual Media: Civilization IV Medley - Christopher Tin

Best Classical Crossover Album: Video Games Live: Vol. One

So what does this all mean? Let me take you though what happened, and how the Grammy process works.

- As you all probably know, Video Games Live performs a medley of my music from Civilization IV, consisting of 'Coronation' and 'Baba Yetu'. Earlier this year they struck a deal with EMI Classics to release a collection of selections from their show, including my songs; they titled this album Video Games Live: Vol. One. Right away the album was a hit, and shot up to #8 on the Billboard Classical Crossover charts.

- October rolls around: the time when all the major record labels submit all their artists, songs and albums to The Recording Academy for Grammy consideration. EMI Classics submits Video Games Live: Vol. One for consideration in a number of categories. It's the Recording Academy's job to sift through every single song, artist and album submitted, and eliminate the ones that are ineligible. In the case of the Video Games Live CD, every single submission got eliminated except for two: their submission for 'Best Classical Crossover Album', and 'Best Song Written For Film/TV/Visual Media'.

- The Recording Academy then sends out a ballot listing all the artists, songs and albums that made the cut into the Preliminary Ballot. As mentioned before, I made the cut in the Film/TV/Visual Media category, and the Video Games Live CD made the cut in the Classical category. These ballots go to every single voting member of the Academy. Each member gets to cast a single vote in each of the four big categories (Record Of The Year, Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year, and Best New Artist) and gets to cast up to nine more votes in any of the 31 fields on their ballots.

- The Recording Academy tallies up the votes, and sends a final ballot to its members, containing the five finalist 'Nominees' in each category. Again, each member can vote in the four big categories, but this time they're limited to eight votes in any of the 31 fields.

- The winners of this final round of balloting are announced at the Grammy Awards.

Because I'm sure some of you are curious, there are 110 categories grouped into 31 fields. The fields are pretty broad ranging, and roughly correspond to genres: Folk, Gospel, R&B, etc. Some fields defy explanation: there's a Polka field, with a single category in it ("Best Polka Album")--only around 20 albums get entered into consideration each year, so if you're really hungry for a Grammy, you should consider buying an accordion.

Other fields, understandably, are massive. The biggest categories (like Song Of The Year) get over 700 entries, and it's somehow the responsibility of the voting membership to narrow that down to 5 nominees. (This is when things like marketing come into play.)

As for the categories/fields that I'm listed under, the Best Song Written For Film/TV/Visual Media is pretty stacked, with some heavy hitters such as Alan Menken and Diane Warren, Jack White, Regina Spektor and Peter Gabriel, as well as a gaggle of songs from Camp Rock. So it, uh, doesn't look particularly good, especially since, as far as I can tell, I'm the only one on the list for a song from a video game.

The odds are looking better in the Best Classical Crossover Album category, however. A subset of the 'Classical' field, there are a little over 40 entries on the ballot; and Video Games Live: Vol. One already has some chart cred. There are certainly some big names, such as André Rieu and Libera--but the numbers aren't as overwhelming as the other categories.

So there you have it! Let's hope that I have some good news, and have another reason to blog about this sometime soon.

Art As A Mirror?

There's a school of thought that believes the following:

The purpose of art is to shed light on the human condition.

Lately I've been watching some great movies that seem to do just that. This is all part of my indie/foreign cinema-of-substance kick of the past year: I've been passing up all those movies that, at the end of the day, add nothing to my appreciation of life and beauty, in favor of those that do. (In other words, I didn't see a single movie this summer.) And so for this post, I'm going to recommend two great movies.

On Monday I saw this beauty:

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a doozy of a film. I saw it with a mixed group of men and women, and it was amazingly polarizing in the way that the events of the film were viewed by different sexes. The characters were very well-written; complex and multi-faceted--and the performances behind them reminded me that outside of American mainstream cinema, filmmakers actually give their audiences credit for being able to appreciate subtext. And there's something about 1986 Romania that's just *naturally* expressionistic....patches of snow on the ground, dogs roaming freely on the streets, the sharp contrast of a flock of birds against the sky....the camera did a great job of lingering over the coldness of their world, without resorting to deliberately staged Murnau-esque long shadows, or any other overly self-conscious scenery.

And tonight, I saw The Savages:

Aside from the obnoxious score, it was a great blend of the comic and the tragic (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a spin on Salinger's uber-siblings, Franny and Zooey). On the comic side, it was great seeing these two self-involved intellectuals/artists cope with basic human issues of mortality, without being able to hide behind the walls of their own art (because all artists have an innate ability to use their art as a defense mechanism). (And it was also funny watching Philip Seymour Hoffman play tennis.)

The tragic side hit close to home, though, as I've had elderly family members suffer through dementia and ultimately death. The world of nursing homes and assisted living facilities troubles me on a very visceral level...the sights, sounds and smells of slow death...

Two Deborah Dickson Documentaries

I never really mentioned this before, but over the course of the past four months I also somehow managed to score two feature-length documentaries for director Deborah Dickson. Deborah and I were introduced through a film editor, and she's a pretty fantastic director; the fact that she's been nominated for three Oscars for her other films should attest to that. This afternoon I put the final touches on the second of the two films, and so I thought I'd finally blog about them, as a little diversion from all the album-talk that's dominated over the past few months.

The first one is called Another Day In Paradise, and is executive produced by Mel Gibson and his company Icon Productions. It follows a six-month deployment of the USS Nimitz as it heads to the Persian Gulf in support of the war in Iraq. It's a great film; at once a character study of the men and women of the armed forces (and the lives of those they leave behind), and at the same time, an exploration of the role of an aircraft carrier in modern warfare (hint: it wasn't designed for ferreting out insurgents).

The second is called Witnesses To A Secret War, and chronicles the history of the Hmong of southeast Asia. During the Vietnam war, the US government recruited the Hmong people to wage a secret war by proxy against the Viet Cong; but when the US pulled out, they abandoned the Hmong to the persecution of the communist forces. Those that weren't killed immediately fled across the Mekong River into neighboring Thailand, where they lived in poverty in refugee camps. Eventually they were given the chance to relocate to the US. This film follows one such family as they leave their country--and its tragic past--and resettle in a land where they have a future.

Both films were recorded with the City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, which is one of the oldest of the low-budget session orchestras of Eastern Europe. The cost of recording with them is ridiculously affordable; and while they're not exactly a premiere orchestra, you still get a good bargain out of it. Their string sections seems to be their strong suit, which benefitted my 'Witnesses' score tremendously.

Ray And Charles Eames: Powers Of Ten

My favorite furniture designers by far are Ray and Charles Eames. Back in the 50s, in addition to revolutionizing the use of molded plywood in furniture, they made a few eye-popping films high-concept films, including this classic, Powers Of Ten. Go ahead--be a high-school science geek all over again.



The score was written by none other than Elmer Bernstein (no relation to Leonard).

In other news, the pressure's on here for my album! I'm meeting with my conductor in a few weeks: Maestro Lucas Richman, director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, former pupil of Leonard Bernstein and former teacher of none other than yours truly. I have to have the scores for the recording session ready by then. Yikes!

Warding Off A Cold (or maybe Tuberculosis...)

My younger cousin came to visit me for a week, but her timing couldn't be worse. I'm up against a deadline to deliver a score to an Icon Productions documentary entitled Another Day In Paradise (directed by three-time Oscar nominee Deborah Dickson and produced by, among others, Mel Gibson).

My cousin's been doing NGO work in Cambodia for the last eight months, and she brought me a little souvenir from her travels--a sore throat, cough, and general state of misery that seems like a common cold, but has the slim possibility of being something worse. In her travels and work in Cambodia, she was exposed to a fair bit of active tuberculosis....so there's the outside chance that what she has might be TB! In which case I might be the first film composer this century who was unable to complete a film because he contracted something as ludicrous as tuberculosis.