Stewart Copeland, best known as the drummer for The Police, joined naturalist Martyn Stewart to create Wild Concerto, an album that surrounds decades of animal field recordings with orchestral music. The project pairs Copeland’s arranging and compositional skills with Martyn Stewart’s extraordinary archive of wildlife sounds — some from species now extinct or endangered — and treats the animals’ vocalizations as the primary performers while human musicians provide accompaniment.
Martyn Stewart has spent more than 60 years traveling the world with a microphone, building nearly 100,000 recordings of birds, frogs, mammals and other creatures. His collection contains rare, last-known or hard-to-find audio: the golden Panamanian frog, material connected to the Northern White rhino, howler monkeys, kookaburras, Namibian hyenas and even a crocodile that once swallowed a microphone. Stewart listens to his recordings as if using a stethoscope for ecosystems — the presence, pitch and timing of bird and frog calls often signal environmental change.
As his health declined, Stewart’s niece urged him to preserve and share the archive more widely. Copeland, who moved from rock drumming into film scores and classical composition, was invited to compose around the raw field samples. They recorded at Abbey Road Studios, where Copeland wrote orchestral parts designed to complement, never drown, the animal voices. Musicians played with the animal tracks in their headsets, responding in real time to pitch, rhythm and mood so the instruments would echo or answer the nonhuman leads.
Instrumental choices were guided by the animals themselves: Arctic wolves were paired with low-brass timbres such as trombone to blend with howls; the screaming piha and other birds received textures matched to their timbre and rhythmic patterns. One recurring centerpiece is the hyena: its wide vocal range and complex social calls inspired a composition that treats its laughs and softer “love” sounds as melodic or textural material, making the animal sound like an operatic soloist.
For Copeland the project drew on a long habit of arranging found sound — from unconventional percussion in film scores to operatic work — and on a career that shifted from rock into cinematic and orchestral writing, in part after film directors recruited him for rhythmically inventive scores. On Wild Concerto he aims to honor the animals’ phrasing and character rather than overlay human melodies on top of them.
Stewart stresses the album’s conservation intent. The recordings document population and habitat declines and in some cases preserve voices that may no longer be heard in the wild. By placing these sounds in accessible music, he hopes to draw listeners who might not otherwise seek out raw field recordings and to foster empathy that could help conservation efforts.
Wild Concerto functions as both musical experiment and sound-documentary: a listening experience in which wolves, hyenas, owls, frogs and birds are more than ambience — they are central performers, and human players answer their calls. Stewart continues fieldwork, believing audio to be a vital barometer of ecological health, and hopes the album will deepen attention to the losses his archive records.