ABOUT STEWART COPELAND
Stewart Copeland has spent more than four decades at the forefront of contemporary music as a rock star and acclaimed film composer, as well as in the disparate worlds of symphony, opera, world and chamber music. During his career he has won seven Grammy awards.
Recruiting Sting and Andy Summers in 1977, Copeland is renowned as the founder of The Police, a band that became a defining force in rock music from the ‘80s onwards.
Copeland moved beyond the rock arena in the mid-1980s when he returned to his classical roots with both opera and film music. His concert works include Tyrant's Crush, commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Poltroons in Paradise commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; and Gamelan D'Drum, commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for gamelan and symphony orchestras.
2025 marks a new collaboration between Copeland and Platoon (Apple Inc.) with the release of “Wild Concerto” , a unique album in collaboration with Martyn Stewart, released on Earth Day 2025 at King’s Place, London. Copeland also premieres a new commission for percussion ensemble by The Julliard School to be premiered on 12 April 2025 in New York City and further at Aspen Festival.
Copeland has also written eight operas, based on stories by Edgar Allen Poe: The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart as well as the surreal chamber opera The Invention of Morel. 2021 saw the premiere of Electric Saint, commissioned by Deutsch National Theatre, Weimar, as well the oratorio, Satan’s Fall, based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Copeland’s eighth opera The Witches Seed was premiered in Italy in 2022 and has been revived for three new productions in 2024.
In recent years Copeland has expanded into on-camera television work presenting two hugely successful BBC documentaries Stewart Copeland’s Adventures in Music and Stewart Copeland…On Drums in 2020, following on from an earlier travel documentary Island Fever featured on the Discovery Channel in the U.S. These documentaries took him to the highest reaches of academia (McGill, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard) to discover the anthropological and evolutionary purpose of music. He has also delved into his family’s interesting past with the critically acclaimed Audible podcast “My Dad The Spy”.
Recipient of the Hollywood Film Festival's first Outstanding Music in Film Visionary Award, seven Grammys, and a 2003 inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Copeland has been responsible for some of the film world's most innovative and ground-breaking scores. His film scores include Oliver Stone's Wall Street, the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, the Oscar-nominated Four Days in September. His composing work in television includes contributions to The Equalizer, Babylon V, and Desperate Housewives. He also scored the blockbuster hit video game ‘Spyro the Dragon’.
Further awards include the keys to the cities of Milan, New York, Dallas, Melpignano and Cannes; knighthood (Chevalier of the Order of Arts & Letters) in France. In 2024 Copeland was the recipient of the Meadows Award for Artistry of International Renown.
Through it all, a sense of humour and appreciation for his utterly unique career has shone through as he has enjoyed working in a remarkable array of genres.