There is a long Hollywood tradition of attempting to shoehorn ethnic folk music in orchestral format. Actually, it predates Hollywood; 18th and 19th century symphonic composers were fond of tossing a triangle into an otherwise perfectly Western-sounding movement and dubbing it “Turkish”.

I’m not one to turn down a chance to engage in a little cultural imperialism myself. This cue from Empire Earth 2 opens with a solo from a Armenian wind instrument called a duduk (film composers love it for its sinuous sound, and often use it as a shorthand for “attention audience: we’re now in Damascus”). The music then transitions to a more traditionally symphonic crescendo, meant to evoke the vastness of the desert and civilizations long past. Now if only I had remembered to add a triangle…

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	Sands of Arabia

This moody and lyrical cue features soprano sax, a recurring modal piano ostinato, and string orchestra.

I’ve always liked using the saxophone as an orchestral voice, in distinction from its traditional role as infantryman in the jazz army. (Or in the case of the soprano sax, the easy-listening army.) In its upper register, the instrument can function almost like an oboe, but with a somewhat smoother and less pinched tone.

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	Dennis Alone

Nothing perks up a Friday like some good old-fashioned, wholesome battle-to-the-death music. Here’s some of my Mideastern-styled action scoring from Empire Earth 3. This piece features abundant ethnic hand percussion, snarling brass, and that most traditional of pan-Mideastern musical sounds: cello pizzicato routed through a guitar amplifier.

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	Struggle In The Sands

Brooding and lyrical, this orchestral cue adopts the classic “rounded binary” form – a theme, followed by a contrasting B section, capped with a brief reprise of the opening material. It also reflects my fondness of using the woodwind section for color, even in the context of a ensemble sound where strings and brass predominate. (A gripe I have with epic film music these days is that it’s so brass-strings-percussion heavy that the woodwinds get overlooked… but that’s a subject for a blog post of its own.)

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	A Dark Future