The Tin Angel Opera, a testament to the power of friendship and music in a dark world, is the culmination of a singular personal and creative journey by composer Daniel Asia and poet Paul Pines. It began in 1978 at MacDowell, an artist colony in the woods of New Hampshire, the kind of place where creativity is a simmering brew of works in progress, and where the denizens meld with others in their own and other disciplines in sometimes life-changing ways. Asia and Pines struck up a friendship marked by a chain of pieces that would emerge over the next 25 years before Pines’s death in 2018. Says Asia: “We have gone through our lives together, checking in periodically, and gauging our development and understanding of life and our art through our artistic interaction.”