Veljo Tormis achieved a breakthrough with the release of a double CD, Forgotten Peoples. Photograph: Eve Tarm/AP

The Estonian composer Veljo Tormis, who has died aged 86, wrote choral works based on the folksong and poetry of languages that are now disappearing or extinct. Those from the Finno-Ugric family that have established themselves in modern nations Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian have flourished, but several related tongues used to be heard on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. The rites, poetry and music of the people who spoke them never attracted attention at a national level: in taking them as the creative basis for his music, Tormis created a personal sound museum of a lost world.

Other composers from the region most notably Sibelius have often used folklore from the viewpoint of western musical ideals. Tormis was a pioneer in letting the folklore dictate the course of the music, rather than trying to coerce it into the established frameworks of western music. His work is free in narrative fantasy, incorporating such features as the sounds of village life or birdsong, sparse in development and lavish in theatricality. The usual life of a composer, with its symphonies and operas, would have been too limiting for him. As he put it: I dont use folk melody it is folk melody that uses me.

He achieved a breakthrough with the release of a double CD on the ECM label, Forgotten Peoples (1992), on which the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir was conducted by Tnu Kaljuste. The opening track of the first choral cycle, Livonian Heritage, depicts birds waking in a dense forest; Livonians lived on the coast of what is now Latvia. Another cycle, Ingrian Evenings, recreates a festive evening of songs and dances in a village, and so is often presented as a staged work; Ingrians were Lutheran Finns speaking a south-eastern dialect of Finnish, who by the 17th century had moved to the St Petersburg region, at the eastern end of the gulf.

A further ECM recording, Litany to Thunder (1999), contains Curse Upon Iron, a work of symbolic importance for Estonians. It features the shamans drum of the Koryak people, living in the northern part of Kamchatka, on Russias far east coast, and denounces the destructive military uses of the metal.

Tormis was born the eldest son of a Lutheran parish clerk, Riho Tormis, and his wife, Johanna, in Kuusalu, east of the capital city of Tallinn. He was nine when Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union, and after organ and choral conducting studies in Tallinn (1942-51) went to the Moscow Conservatoire to study composition with Vissarion Shebalin (1951-56). When he returned to Tallinn, he quickly rose to prominence as a composer, initially producing works in a traditional vein, including symphonies and an opera, The Swans Flight (1966). His Overture No 2 (1959) was the first work by an Estonian composer to be performed at the Warsaw Autumn festival, in 1961. Two of the countrys other leading composers, Arvo Prt and Kuldar Sink, studied with him during his time as a teacher at the Tallinn Music high school (1956-60).

From the Khrushchev thaw of the late 1950s, when national music became a secret tool of anti-Sovietism, Tormis explored Estonian folklore, and then in the 1970s and 80s that of other Finno-Ugric and Baltic peoples. He produced more than 60 choral cycles, often including the names of native peoples in the titles, as with his Votic Wedding Songs, Vepsian Paths and Izhorian Epic, all also to be heard on Forgotten Peoples.

His music was taken up not only in Estonia, but in Latvia, Lithuania and other Soviet-bloc countries. Singing in general was a significant factor in public demonstrations in the years leading up to Estonias independence from Soviet rule in 1991, and Tormis drew on its power to express the forest pantheism that remains at least as strong in the national psyche as the Christianity that followed it. At the Estonian Song festival, held every five years in Tallinn most recently in 2014 thousands of people in amateur choirs sang Tormiss works, and he was an avid visitor to schools, keen to reconnect children with their ancient heritage.

Other parts of the world with a strong choral tradition started taking up Tormiss music, not least as a result of the global tours of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. During the Gorbachev glasnost period of the 1980s it found a particular following in the US and Germany, and the ECM releases brought it an audience throughout western Europe.

Tormiss political concerns extended beyond national independence to environmental issues, social exclusion, and the emptiness of modern politics. In 2000 he retired from composition. A very gracious man, he was revered by a nation that loves to sing.

In 1951, he married Lea Rummo, a theatre historian. She survives him, along with their son, Tnu, a photographer whose work appears on the cover of Forgotten Peoples and on many subsequent recordings of his fathers music.

Veljo Tormis, composer, born 7 August 1930; died 21 January 2017

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