Suite (Gladiator)

Zimmer wrote the score for Ridley Scott's Gladiator in 1999, working with the Australian singer Lisa Gerrard, whose wordless vocal lines carry the film's private material against the massed brass and percussion of the arena scenes. Gerrard sings in no language at all; the syllables are her own invention. One battle cue drew comparisons with Holst's Mars and a complaint from the Holst estate. The score won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award, and its combination of orchestra, synthesiser pulse and solo female voice was imitated across the decade that followed.