Stewart Copeland, composer

Stewart Copeland has spent more than three decades at the forefront of contemporary music as rock star and acclaimed film composer, as well as in the disparate worlds of opera, ballet, and world and chamber music.

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 through to the present day. His career includes the sale of more than 60 million records worldwide, and numerous awards, including five Grammy awards.

Copeland moved beyond the rock arena in the mid-1980s when he returned to his classical roots with creative pursuits in concert and film music. His most recent concert works include BEN-HUR, A Tale of the Christ which features Copeland as soloist in a live orchestral score for the 1925 silent film; Tyrant’s Crush: Concerto for Trapset and Orchestra 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 the world percussion group D’Drum.

In 2017, The Chicago Opera Theater premiered Copeland’s surreal chamber opera The Invention of Morel, a co-commission with Long Beach Opera based on the novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Copeland has also written two operas based on stories by Edgar Allen Poe: The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart. This season, The Sheriff of Luxembourg, Stewart Copeland’s rousing new work for solo percussion and tape, will be premiered by Christoph Sietzen in Cologne and toured in Europe throughout the season.

Recipient of the Hollywood Film Festival’s first Outstanding Music in Film Visionary Award, a Grammy nominee for his 2005 CD Orchestralli, 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 numerous film scores include Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the seminal score for the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, the score for Bruno Barreto’s Oscar-nominated Four Days in September and his Emmy nomination for the Showtime pilot and series Dead Like Me. His work in television includes contributions to The Equalizer, Babylon V, and most recently Desperate Housewives. The rise, subsequent success, and ultimate demise of The Police over an eight-year period were all recorded and kept as a video diary in 8mm film by Copeland. That diary became the film Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and debuted on the Showtime network.

Never one to rest between projects, Stewart and keyboard virtuoso Jon Kimura Parker recently formed an instrumental quintet with a highly eclectic repertoire including interpretations of music by Stravinsky, The Police, Debussy and Aphex Twin. Learn more at https://www.polyarts.co.uk/artists/stewart-copeland.

Back to Satan’s Fall.