Scores based on World Traditional Music

Black Hawk Down, hands down.

A lot of scores by Bruno Coulais and Armand Amar are based on traditional music. Sometimes even on some many different cultures in one score, that it would be hard to decribe.

I particularly adore Danna's score to Water. Pure gold.

Rahman wrote a few songs. He didn't co-write Danna's score.

Also I really like Zimmer's use of Chinese instruments in The Pirate Lord Of Singapore.

I dunno which one is what!

Gotta research my stuff.

Is erhu the one playing low notes in the beginning of the track?

If Zimmer, or those posted in the list initially (with very few exceptions) is your idea of world music influenced scores, you'll be stunned when you listen some REAL world music-colored scores such as Shigeru Umebayashi's, Mychael Danna's, Armand Amar's, Bruno Coulais, Yvan Casaar's, Cyril Morin's etc.

And of course, how could I forget - Jerry Goldsmith's MULAN(Chinese) and THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS (African)!

FAR AND AWAY by John Williams - Irish. I missed in that list.

Generally the Danna brothers (both of them) have a lot to say in ethnic composing, that's true. It also is helped by the fact that they released few Celtic albums.

Very dangerous suggestion to think of it. What do we know about ancient music anyway?

Virtually nothing, apart some assumptions derived from works of art of the era, some books with drafty reports on the subject matter, etc etc.

Of course we don't know how the music was in 2000 years ago. There is no CD's with music recorded from that time.

This is an excerpt from the liner notes:
"This unusual score was also nurtruted by almost one year of research in music libraries, sound recording archives, correspondence with Biblichal scholars and innumerable searches on the Internet, Before Jeff Danna and I travelled to London and Cambridgeshire, England, to listen and learn about a variety of musical insruments that originated more than 2.000 years ago.
Jeff had already worked extensively in composing film music for different cultures, and was obviously intrigued by this worldof ancient instruments and their expressive possibilities, which he fluently incorporated into his creative conception
The score also showcases the remarkable voice of Esther Lamandier, a French mezzo-soprano renowed for her soulful realizations of ancient Hebraic music. Integral to the score are the Aramaic chants sung by Ms. Lamandier. The provenance of these chants is the closer chronological approximation to the time of Jesus and they are sung in His language."