Perhaps the successor to incidental music and the film score is the video game score, which may often use pure orchestral music, not even with electronic elements. It's an interesting question whether this repertory will bleed into the traditional classical marketplace, and the large crossover albums of composer Christopher Tin, who hails from the same Silicon Valley that produces the games, tend to answer the question in the affirmative. The opening selection of To Shiver the Sky, "Il Sogno di Volare," was written for a game in the "Civilization" series designed by Tin's roommate at Stanford, Soren Johnson; it was Tin's wildly successful "Baba Yetu," for Johnson's Civilization IV, that first put Tin on the map. The critical point is that Tin's albums successfully make the transition from video game music to full-fledged collections of compositions, and To Shiver the Sky perhaps goes even a step further: it is a choral-orchestral song cycle, taking the history of flight as a theme. Tin draws on an impressive variety of texts, all sung in their original languages. "Il Sogno di Volare" is drawn from writings of Leonardo da Vinci on the subject of flying, and Tin brings in Hildegard von Bingen, Ovid, Dante, Copernicus, astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the Bhagavad Gita (most ominously), and more, including for the finale, John F. Kennedy's Rice University address on the U.S. moon shot program. Tin's music indeed does resemble that of a film score; compared with John Williams, it may suffer a bit, but whose would not? His settings are varied and engaging, and he conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra himself, as well as a grouping of English choirs that is well drilled in the many languages involved. Tin's fans will already be awaiting this release. The new factor commercially is that listeners from beyond the video game sphere may also be interested. ~ James Manheim