Take the Oscar-nommed score to "Sergeant York" by Max Steiner, a native Viennese. Steiner, of course, also wrote music to two classic evocations of the Old South, "Gone With the Wind" and "Jezebel." Or consider an oater like "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin, a true son of the West -- OK, so he was born in Ukraine.

The point is, nationality isn't really an issue in film scoring; talent counts.

Yet it's not entirely true that a composer's passport is irrelevant -- although most of the time, the apprehensions and doubts are his own.

Craig Armstrong, who wrote the score to Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center," is a native of Glasgow, Scotland, where he still lives.

Some might find it odd that Stone sought someone from across the Pond to help depict a fresh American tragedy, but Armstrong offers this comeback: He was in Manhattan on 9/11, though that wasn't why Stone gave him the job.

Armstrong's score to "WTC" eschews the blustering machismo one expects from a film about policemen trapped under heaps of rubble.

"I eventually saw the music as a requiem for anyone who had lost his life to violence," says the composer. "I found that was an easier way into the project."

He insists he didn't feel odd being asked to score this inherently American film.

"Maybe I should have thought that, but it didn't cross my mind," he says. "The first time I thought about it was after the film came out and someone said how nice it was that someone from another country could empathize."

His biggest challenge was achieving balance.

"You couldn't be overemotional, and you couldn't be underemotional," says Armstrong. "It was a difficult project, but it was one I wanted to do. Only after everything was over did I ask myself, Why did I want to do this? I think it was cathartic, but I didn't realize that until the film was out."

With the exception of "Hotel Rwanda," Andrea Guerra had scored only Italian films when he was asked to write music for Will Smith starrer "The Pursuit of Happyness," a Horatio Alger tale set in 1980s San Francisco.

For the composer, the primary challenge was cultural. European scores tend to be more overtly emotional than American ones, and with a heartstring-tugging movie like "Happyness," minimizing sentimentality was vital.

"I wanted it to be sentimental but not in a romantic-movie way," says Guerra through a translator. "It's ingrained in Italians to push for emotion."

Gabriel Yared faced a different dilemma with Anthony Minghella's "Breaking and Entering." Yared has scored all the director's films since "The English Patient," but they contained scope and sweep absent from this effort, Minghella's most intimate since "Truly Madly Deeply."

"Anthony told me it's an urban film and that he wanted me to collaborate with a band," says Yared, who was born in Beirut but has lived in Brazil, Paris and now London. "He had been listening to Underworld and asked me what I thought, and I said I'd love to work with them."

"Breaking and Entering" explores the melancholy lives of several Londoners. The pic's common denominator is bittersweetness, which Yared had to evoke with Underworld, the techno band that Rick Smith and Karl Hyde started in the early 1980s.

"I'm always afraid of happy things in music," says Yared. "I'm not gifted for that. I'm a very happy person, but I'm not driven to write happy music. "

The cosmopolitan Yared considers his collaboration with Underworld a success. "I knew instantly that this would work," he says.

Yet he remains a firm believer in the Western musical tradition that began with Bach.

"Music is built on architecture," he says. "It's impossible to be a complete composer if you don't know the rules."

Among the most imaginative film composers of his generation, Alexandre Desplat, who was born in Paris and still lives there, feels similarly.

He's earned especially good notices this year for his scores to "The Queen" and "The Painted Veil," which received a Golden Globe nomination.

Yet different as these scores are -- one limns modern England, the other 1920s China -- they each present similar challenges: conveying a world far from the composer's own.

"How can a Frenchman deal with the United Kingdom and its monarchy?" wonders Desplat. The solution, he says, lies in director Stephen Frears' irreverent approach to his subject.

"Stephen is never mocking anyone; he's just having fun, gently," Desplat explains.

Anglo-French enmity notwithstanding, the composer avoided nationalist distractions.

"I was raised in France," he says, "but my mother is Greek, and my parents were students in the United States. So I don't think, 'I'm French, but I'm doing a Chinese or Italian movie.'�"

He suggests that not being English offered an advantage. "Maybe I was more distant than a British composer would have been," he says. "I didn't have this pressure on me."

Like Guerra, Desplat worried that his Continental sensibilities might not allow enough detachment. But he says Frears encouraged more, not less, overt feeling.

"Stephen pushed me to give even more warmth to Helen Mirren's character. In the scenes where she's in the countryside, the stag scene, I introduced the low oboe, the English horn. That was a private joke, to use the English horn for the Queen of England. What could be better?"

"The Painted Veil" presented different hurdles.

"We decided early that we would not do any Chinese parody," says Desplat.

Instead, he used Western instruments to suggest the sounds of various Asian instruments. Desplat even introduced an electric cello, played by Vincent Segal, to mimic a Chinese violin.

Desplat's final score for this film uses no indigenous Chinese instruments -- the film's haunting waltz is played on a piano, by China's Lang Lang. That was Plan B. Originally, Desplat envisioned a violin duet between a Western fiddle and a Chinese one.

"Then 'Memoirs of a Geisha' came out," the composer recalls, "and John Williams used the violin and the cello to evoke the Far East. I couldn't go there after he did that. The only thing Chinese now is Lang Lang."