Stewart Copeland: Wild Concerto

If ever there was a sign that former Police drummer and film composer Stewart Copeland had been given free rein to go wild then it’s here in this 12-movement Concerto, in which the soloists are plucked from the animal kingdom. Drawing on the extensive archive of British sound recordist and environmentalist Martyn Stewart, Copeland samples birdsong and animal calls from around the world—from the whistling of white-throated sparrows to the laughs of hyenas—and fuses them with the traditional instruments of a 30-piece orchestra, with Copeland on percussion. “A true ornithologist would hear this and say, ‘Wait a minute: what’s that red-breasted nuthatch doing so close to its predator, all singing nicely together?’” Copeland tells Apple Music Classical. “These animals would probably be eating each other in the real world.” Playful humour runs abound in Copeland’s jazzy work, where you’ll hear the comical chorus of frogs alongside elephantine brass, and a sax that sounds as throaty as a Galapagos seal in one track and howls like a wolf in another. The work’s overall narrative is loosely inspired by the epic journey of the Arctic tern, which migrates every year from its breeding grounds in the North Pole to Antarctica: you can almost feel the temperature drop as the tropical “Screaming Piha” of the fifth movement gives way to the freezing winds and shivering tremolo strings of “Penguins in the World of Antarctica.” But there is more going on here than simple storytelling. What interests Copeland is the way in which we make sense of the sounds we hear. “When you have a bird singing like the white-throated sparrow, it goes ‘tweet, tweet, tweet,’” he says. “It has articulation. It has contours. It goes up and down. It has a rhythm of sorts, although it’s not a consistent rhythm that you could dance to, but those elements are sort of implied. If you put a flute next to that sparrow, or a trombone next to that howling wolf, your ear connects the atonality of the animal with the tonality of the musical instrument; your mind joins them together. And that’s what this album is all about, that fun thing that the brain does with sound and attaching melody to it.” Built up over six decades, Martyn Stewart’s sound archive comprises more than 30,000 hours of material including more than 3,500 bird species alone. How did Copeland go about choosing which animals to include in his musical menagerie? “First, there are the background sounds,” he explains—ambient noises such as a huge flock of birds taking off, or the sound of the howling wind, which create atmosphere. Then there are the rhythmic sounds: “in the redwoods, there’s one bird that just goes, ‘whoop, whoop, whoop.’” And then, adds Copeland, there are “the divas of the animal kingdom, like the sparrow or the wolf who have a lead melody, which in music we call the top line. And breaking it down into those three categories is sort of my method.” Working with “found sounds” is nothing new for Copeland—you’ll hear the clack of billiard balls and hoot of car horns in his score for Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, and barking dogs evoking the dog-eat-dog world of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. And while orchestration is something Copeland’s still getting used to (“I have to squint a little bit harder than people who have been looking at dots their whole lives”), the musical ideas come easily to him. “Once the imagination takes over, and the juices start flowing, the music arises,” he says. “I don’t know where it comes from; it just sort of appears, and I’m very thankful for that.”