Rock legend, naturalist team up to turn field recordings of animals into music
In a Nutshell
Stewart Copeland and wildlife recordist Martyn Stewart created the album *Wild Concerto* by transforming Stewart's 100,000 field recordings of animals—including extinct and endangered species—into orchestral music at Abbey Road Studios. The project pairs specific animal sounds with instruments, like Arctic wolves with trombone and the screaming pia bird with orchestral arrangements, to reach new audiences with an environmental message. Stewart, who is battling cancer, sees the work as a way to preserve these recordings and raise awareness about species loss.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Stewart Copeland, drummer from The Police with Andy Summers and Sting, has teamed up with naturalist Martyn Stewart for an album called Wild Concerto. The album features animal sounds including hyenas, owls, and howler monkeys, based on Stewart's collection of nearly 100,000 audio recordings of wildlife. Some species featured are now extinct or endangered, making the album both a music project and environmental manifesto.
The recording session takes place at Abbey Road Studios, where Copeland and Stewart work with an orchestra to transform animal recordings into a concerto. The animals featured include wrens, bears, frogs, kookaburras, and wombat pigeons. Copeland wrote the music while Stewart provided the raw field recordings.
Martyn Stewart has spent decades collecting approximately 100,000 recordings of wild animals, requiring Copeland to review 30,000 hours of field recordings. The screaming pia bird was selected for orchestral treatment, with its raw sounds dictating the choice of instruments. Arctic wolves were paired with trombone, transforming their howls into what Copeland describes as becoming "Pavarotti" when combined with orchestral instruments.
As one-third of The Police, Copeland helped the band sell more than 75 million records. The group disbanded in 1986. Copeland's transition to composition began when Francis Coppola hired him to score the film Rumble Fish, recognizing Copeland's rhythmic expertise despite his lack of formal film scoring experience.
Coppola's concept for Rumble Fish centered on rhythm, leading Copeland to arrange "found sounds" including barking dogs, clacking billiard balls, and pile drivers into rhythmic loops. This approach proved particularly useful for horror film scoring. Copeland later expanded into classical music composition, creating an opera with the Deutsche National Theater in Germany.
Copeland's father raised him to be a jazz musician while his mother played Stravinsky, Ravel, and other classical composers. He describes having "Jimi Hendrix in one ear and Igor Stravinsky in the other," with these influences interacting throughout his compositional work. He emphasizes creating parts that are "fun to play" for musicians.
Stewart began recording at age 11 using a tape recorder in the Bluebell woods near his home in middle England. His first recordings captured a Eurasian blackbird. What began as a childhood hobby evolved into a career with an environmental mission. Stewart states: "I always believe the reason I'm on this planet is to fight for the animals and the environment. And it's kind of my rent for being here."
Stewart's message focuses on species loss, noting significant changes in locations he's monitored over 20-year periods. He describes audio as "the barometer of the planet," explaining that specific species indicate environmental health: dippers reveal stream and river health, frogs indicate marsh health, and birds show overall planetary health.
Stewart continues daily recording in Florida, describing his microphone as "like a doctor with a stethoscope." He possesses the last known recording of the golden Panamanian frog and recordings of the northern white rhino, now extinct in the wild. He survived a crocodile that swallowed one of his microphones and recorded howler monkeys and hyenas on Namibia's Skeleton Coast.
Stewart Copeland's favorite animal is the hyena. The hyenas' recordings feature their wide vocabulary including loving sounds, aggressive sounds, and the laughing hyena. Copeland and his wife adopted hyena love sounds as part of their relationship. The hyenas received their own track on Wild Concerto.
Stewart is living with cancer and was motivated to preserve his archive by his niece Amanda, who works at the BBC. He fears mass extinction, stating: "If we keep stealing from nature, then the inevitable is going to happen. We're going to lose a lot more." He hopes Wild Concerto will help people fall in love with endangered species and potentially slow extinction rates.
Copeland hopes Wild Concerto will immortalize animal songs as "a human tribute, a heartfelt elegy to Mother Nature's orchestra." The project aims to reach audiences who wouldn't otherwise listen to wildlife recordings, using musical enhancement to draw attention to endangered species.
Keep 60 Minutes in your library
Save the videos and channels worth coming back to, and find them again in one place.
