Pavlov is on your side.

[Saber Cherry]

Agrajag said:
The entire HoMM series had awesome music, so why can't you?

HoMM 3, for example, had a large budget for music. Now ironically, ID Software's games have had huge budgets for music, and their music was utterly terrible. And Star Control II had great music composed by one of the programmers. But generally speaking, I think you'll find that games with great music have both a budget and staff for music... while gameplay quality is almost totally independant of buget. Therefore, the number of games whose gameplay is substantially better than their music is inevitably large.

On the other hand, there was a strategy game I played a long time ago set to a Rachmaninoff piano piece, which was exceptionally fitting for the dark atmosphere. There's a large amount of essentially license-free classical music that can be applied to games, just as it is often applied to movies, but this is rarely done. I think it would be a nice addition, especially if each race featured classical from a specific composer or genre...


My suggestions:

Carmen (the opera) instrumental pieces for Marignon
Wagner (Ride of the Valkyries) for Vanheim battles, and "A Night on Bald Mountain" for normal music.
Wagner (Ring Cycle, parts where fat ladies are singing) for Jotunheim
Bach fugues for Ulm
Vivaldi (Four Seasons, changing with the season) for Tien Chi
Mozart's Requiem for Ermor
Gregorian chants for Pythium
Strange 12-tone crap for Ryleh
Handel's Water Music for Atlantis
Beethoven's 9th (Choral part) for Abysia
Irish tavern songs for Man (not really classical, but that's ok)
Orff (Carmena Burana) for Mictlan
Panflute (aka panpipe) music for Pangaea (of course! I don't know of any composers, though)
Indonesian gamalan music for C'tis
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata for Arco
Star Control II Illwrath music for Machaka. Haha! Just kidding - drums and chanting would be better.