Stewart Copeland, best known as the drummer for The Police, and naturalist Martyn Stewart teamed up to create Wild Concerto, an album that places orchestral music around decades of field recordings of animals. The project pairs Copeland’s composing and arranging with Stewart’s extraordinary archive of wildlife sounds, some of which capture species now extinct or in peril.
Martyn Stewart has spent more than 60 years traveling the globe with a microphone, amassing nearly 100,000 recordings of birds, mammals, frogs and other creatures. His archive includes rare or last-known audio — like the golden Panamanian frog and recordings related to the Northern White rhino, among many others — as well as vivid encounters: howler monkeys, kookaburras, hyenas from Namibia, a crocodile that once swallowed a microphone. Stewart uses his recorder like a stethoscope, listening for the health of ecosystems: the calls of stream-dwelling birds and frogs often signal environmental change.
Stewart’s niece urged him to preserve and share the archive as his health declined; he has lived with cancer and wanted the sounds to reach wider audiences. Copeland, who moved from rock drumming into film scores and classical composition, was approached to craft music around Stewart’s raw field samples. The result, Wild Concerto, treats animal vocalizations as lead performances and places human musicians in a supporting role.
The collaborators recorded at Abbey Road Studios, where Copeland placed orchestral parts to complement — never drown — the animals’ voices. Copeland says the animals dictated instrumental choices: for Arctic wolves, a trombone blended with howls; for birds such as the screaming piha, orchestral textures were matched to the birds’ timbre and rhythm. During sessions, musicians listened to the animal tracks in their headsets while they played, often responding in real time to the recordings’ pitch, rhythm and emotion. Copeland described arranging “found sound” throughout his career — from film scores made with nontraditional percussion (barking dogs, billiard balls) to operas — and applying that sensibility to Stewart’s archive.
One recurring example on the project is the hyena, whose wide vocal range and social calls inspired a distinct composition. Copeland and Stewart both delight in the more surprising parallels between human and animal expression: Stewart shared recordings of both affectionate “love” sounds and the eerie laughing calls hyenas produce. Copeland and the orchestra treated those sounds as central melodic or textural material, crafting parts that make the animals sound like soloists.
Stewart emphasizes the album’s conservation impulse. His field recordings document declines in wildlife and habitat; in some cases the album preserves voices that may be gone from the wild. He hopes presenting the sounds within accessible music will draw listeners who might not otherwise pay attention to raw animal recordings. “If you show people the beauty of something, and get them to fall in love with it, maybe we can tip something,” Stewart said.
For Copeland, the project was an opportunity to bridge rock, film and classical worlds. His career pivot into composing began after director Francis Ford Coppola hired him to score films that needed rhythmic invention; the drummer became adept at turning everyday noises into percussive and melodic material. On Wild Concerto he applies orchestral color and compositional craft to honor the animals’ own phrasing and sonic character rather than imposing human melodies over them.
Wild Concerto mixes reverence with creativity: animal recordings remain audible and integral, while orchestral arrangements amplify and echo their rhythms, pitches and moods. The album serves both as a musical experiment and as a documentary catalog set to human tribute — an elegy to vulnerable species and a manifesto about listening. At Abbey Road, Stewart watched the orchestra respond to recordings at times as if the animals were on stage; Copeland called the experience “magical,” noting that pairing instruments with animal voices can transform raw calls into something like operatic solos.
Beyond the studio, Stewart continues to go out into the field with his microphone, tracking changes and loss in ecosystems. He believes audio is a barometer of planetary health: the presence or absence of certain bird, frog or insect calls can indicate ecological collapse or recovery. He hopes Wild Concerto will draw more attention to those losses and to the importance of preserving wildlife voices.
Wild Concerto thus aims to do two things at once: make inventive music that foregrounds nonhuman performers, and use that music to raise awareness of species decline. Copeland, who gained fame drumming with Sting and Andy Summers as part of The Police, brings dramatic orchestral sense to the project; Stewart brings a lifetime of field expertise and an archive Roberts calls “unmatched.” Together, they fashioned a listening experience in which hyenas, wolves, owls, birds and frogs are more than ambient background — they are the artists, and human musicians answer their call.