Stewart Copeland on the orchestra, the Police and the white-throated sparrow

For the many readers of Classical Music whose tastes stray beyond the works of Britten and Beethoven in the direction of rock bands from Led Zeppelin to Fleetwood Mac, composer and multi-instrumentalist Stewart Copeland will be a household name. Having built a career in the rock scene as the drummer for The Police since 1977, Copeland’s work as a composer will also be familiar through soundtracks for films including Wall Street and Good Burger, and the phenomenally popular 1998 video game Spyro the Dragon. 

Now, Copeland turns his attention to the concert hall with his latest album, Wild Concerto, a celebration of orchestral music and found sound. Using field recordings captured by sound recordist and Listening Planet founder Martyn Stewart (pictured below, left, with Copeland, right), Copeland pairs sounds from the natural world with their orchestral counterparts to create a multi-species orchestra.  

I meet Copeland during a recent visit to London to hear about how his unique approach to orchestral music has developed since creating his first film soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish in 1983. We also chat about his evolving relationship with found sound and his thoughts on his experience of transitioning into the classical music sector and what the classical world can learn from the success of the rock genre. 

The work combines Martyn Stewart’s field recordings of animals and environments from all over the world with their ‘orchestral counterparts’. How did this collaboration come about? 

Martyn spent his life on his hands and knees out in the triple canopy jungle, or the frozen tundra – he’s gone far and wide to get these sounds – and the visionaries at Platoon Records had acquired his incredible library of animal sounds. The guiding concept that we worked up focused on the progress of the arctic tern on its trans-global annual journey and where it might land, so Martyn sent me folders with the sounds of these different locales.

I would get a folder with all kinds of cool sounds, and I would subdivide them into background atmosphere – the sound of the wind howling, or of 1,000 flamingos taking off all at once – and rhythmic sounds. Then there were the divas, the lead animals, like the white-throated sparrow, those are the top line. So I created a backdrop, then a rhythm, then found the animals that could sing the top line – the ones who get the fancier dressing rooms. 

What originally drew you to the idea of writing Wild Concerto using the recorded sounds of the natural world? 

Homo sapiens are all musicians – we are a musical species. We're not all Eric Clapton or Jesse Norman, but we can all carry a pitched tune. The animals on this album, however, although they carry tunes and communicate with sound, are not musical because they're not pitched. Even though the bird’s sound has articulation, contour, and even an inconsistent rhythm, it’s not actual music. We call it bird ‘song’, but actually it's a form of communication. These sounds are interesting and intriguing and have an atmosphere all of their own, but when you put them up against music an interesting thing happens. If I put a flute next to the white-throated sparrow, the human brain connects the two, so when you take the flute away, that sparrow is now singing in tune.  

Colour, pitch and melody don't actually exist – they're constructs of the mind. The brain hears the wavelength and turns it into pitch, and so it's fairly loose in its cognition of something that is almost a pitch. So this record is all about using that factor of the human brain to join these sounds and turn those howling wolves into Coltrane, man. Those are some soul wolves.  

I have to give a shout out to Paul Winter who, many years ago, accompanied wolves with his saxophone in the Sax-Wolf Duet. However, where Winter was able to improvise alongside a recording of a wolf, technology now enables me to take that wolf howl and put it wherever I want to. All the animal sounds I’ve used are not adulterated – I didn't stretch any of the rhythms or auto-tune the red-breasted nuthatch, that's how she sang – but I placed them very carefully in a way that my predecessors couldn't, but computers now allow me to do.

The album is now available to buy and stream – what impact are you hoping it will have on the climate conversation? 

I just hope listeners like it. As for the saving the planet part, Ricky Kej, who produced this record, is a tree hugger par excellence. He's a profoundly gifted musician, but he's dedicated his art to improving the planet. He and Martyn are the real deal, I just make music that I think is beautiful. I would like, for their sake and the planet's sake, to raise awareness of this disappearing habitat, not that I expect the listeners to do anything about it except appreciate that this is the only place you'll ever hear these sounds, because they're going extinct. I just want Wild Concerto to be a record that lights up your world the way any music should, whether there are animals on it or not – that's what musicians do, they make music that moves people. 

You describe Wild Concerto as the culmination of everything you have learned while composing across a broad range of disciplines – can you expand on this approach? 

It started with Francis Ford Coppola, who hired me to do my first film score for a film called Rumble Fish. The idea of the film was time is running out for these characters and he wanted a feel of this teleologic journey, so I built a rhythm leading to this inevitable doom with found sounds; pile drivers, dogs barking, glass breaking and other things, which I used in a musical context. Using found sound is something I've been at for quite a while. When I scored Wall Street, the film looks at the glitterati with all that money, avarice and wickedness, so the director Oliver Stone wanted something meaner. I said, ‘How about dogs?’ and he lit up. I used recordings of dogs snarling and growling as a subliminal part of the music, and it was interesting that the reviews of the film were all somehow canine: ‘a dog-eat-dog world’, ‘The jaws of Wall Street’.  

I spent 20 years as a film composer, and I humbly submit that the film composer has more musical skills than any other form of musician, because the film composers isn't an artist, he's an employee, and for that reason, he has to go places that his artistic instincts would never take him, and his is what led me to begin my relationship with the orchestra. One day Francis turned to me and said, ‘We need strings.’ Up until that point, I'd been playing all the instruments myself and constructing the soundtrack in my own way. I studied music during my first couple years in college, but I never saw a sheet of music for the entire first part of my career. So when Francis said, ‘I want strings,’ I had to actually go out and buy some paper with staves on it.

 When I book a guitarist, they show up with two Les Pauls, a couple of Stratocasters, some guitar you never heard of before, and a Fred Astaire of foot pedals. You spend a wonderful afternoon, exchanging ideas and it's an interaction, a collaboration. But when these strings players arrived and I went into my usual rap, instead of them looking more and more enthused, they looked more and more anxious. Eventually the first violin, says, ‘Maestro, do you want us to play what's on the page here, or whatever you're talking about?’. I, humbled, said: ‘Play the page.’ Consequently, I did not have a glorious afternoon of creativity with the strings, which I was so looking forward to, I had about 20 minutes, which is as much time as it took them to play the piece perfectly, with everything that was on the page, with no debate, no schmooze, nothing. First, I thought, ‘Wow, that's efficient’, then I thought ‘Wow, that's beautiful’. And thus began my journey with the orchestra.  

Over the next 20 years, I used a lot of orchestra. At first, I would write music on a computer and hand it off to somebody who would turn it into orchestration, but I'd show up on the date and it still didn't sound like John Williams, and it was because I hadn’t realised you had to include articulation and accents on the page. Over the years, I gradually learned that language, and finally, I hired a stern-faced professor from USC in California to come over every Friday and teach me the actual language of the score. Now I write my own. 

As a musician who has found success in both the classical sector and the rock sphere, what do you feel classical musicians could learn from the way that the pop world works? 

Improvisation. Rock musicians are terrified of classical musicians because they can read – which is very intimidating – and classical musicians, I have discovered, are intimidated by rock musicians because they can improvise. I divide musicians into two categories that overlap; musicians of the eye – the orchestra – and musicians of the ear – those who connect with the music without looking at anything, and a lot of what they do is improvised. The easy part, I would tell musicians of the eye, is to figure out your key and stick to it. With experience, you'll know when you can play with the rules and throw in a few notes that aren't in your key – you can throw yourself off that cliff, and no one's going to die.

 As a composer, I am lit up when people take my work and do something with it. I was commissioned by the Royal Opera to write an opera based on the Edgar Allan Poe story, The Tell-Tale Heart. I went to the dress rehearsal when the opera was later performed in Long Beach, and my overriding feeling was gratitude that they devoted all those resources, those singers, that orchestra, the hall, the front office to my humble work – then they can do what they want with it. You create a work, and it becomes an entity of its own and has a career of its own. 

You have orchestrated The Police’s best-known songs (as Police Deranged for Orchestra) – what would you say to classical fans who are dismissive of concert formats like ‘pops’ or gaming music? 

The short answer is, it's bringing people into the concert hall who don't turn out for Mozart. When I show up with an orchestral piece, it's generally on the bill alongside pieces from the classical canon. One place I played with an orchestra, and I was on the bill with Ravel, and when I played with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic I was alongside Walton – all these great composers, and Copeland on the same bill! It's a brag, but a proportion of the audience is drawn there because they are drummer fans, and were exposed to those great composers and their work – that's what front office is hoping for. It does seem to be the case that it opens those doors for some people. 

How have you navigated your transition from the rock world into the very different world of classical music? 

As any drummer who calls himself an opera composer, there is a certain insecurity that goes with that gig. But I’ve learned that actually the two worlds are very appreciative of each other and I found a very warm embrace from the classical world. I've never felt any snobbery or anything like that with the programmers of the arts bodies and opera companies, symphony orchestras and such. The artistic directors are little more rarefied in their taste, they'd much rather be doing Debussy, but front office is all for it. 

But last week I was at Juilliard, and I really relish this anecdote: I studied music for the first two years of college, then I went up to UC California at Berkeley but I couldn't get into the music department. I've been banging sh*t since the age of seven, not playing piano, so I wouldn't have been able to keep up with all those kids who've been playing their whole lives. I studied Mass Communication and Public Policy instead, which was very handy – understanding media was how I created a world-smashing rock band. Decades go by, and I got a commission from the Juilliard School of Music, and we started a relationship, then I went and taught there. I actually taught music at Juilliard!