Stewart Copeland has always enjoyed a uniquely varied career. From his earliest days as the drummer for Curved Air, his seven-year relationship as founder/drummer of the Police, through collaborations with Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone, his commitment to his music has been ceaseless. His musical travels have taken him all around the world in search of exotic rythms -- joining Pygmy rituals in Zaire, and musical celebrations from the jungles of Brazil to Easter Island -- from Mozambique to the Australian outback.
A five-time Grammy Award winner, Mr. Copeland has created an astounding multi-dimensional career in music, television and film. For over a decade his film scores and compositions for opera, ballet and orchestra have brought him critical renown and strengthened his stellar reputation as on of the preeminent musicians and percussionists in classical and popular music.
Over the past decade, Stewart Copeland has enjoyed successful collaborations with some of Hollywood's most acclaimed and eclectic directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Kevin Reynolds, Bruce Beresford and John Hughes. He has written several films for UK cult director Ken Loach, and is enjoying a new and productive relationship with Brazilian auteur Bruno Barretto with Four Days in September, nominated for Academy Award as Best Foreign Film.
Mr. Copeland began his move beyond the rock arena in 1984, to create the memorable score to Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish. The Coppola film's soundtrack featured a striking mixture of percussion, an electronically sampled cacophony of car horns and ticking clocks and was completely novel, and in fact pioneered the whole field of sound-designed scores. It earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Score. This unique musical style brought him to the attention of Oliver Stone, to whose soundtrack of the dog-eat-dog world of Wall Street he added eerie howls and ringing bells. The music to Stone's Talk Radio and its doomed disc jockey was another Copeland tour-de-force.
Other film credits of Mr. Copeland's include Arthur Hiller's See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Taking Care of Business, Hugo Van Lawick's The Leopard Son, John Duigan's The Wide Sargasso Sea, Stacy Cochran's Boys, John Waters' Pecker, Peter Berg's hilarious black comedy Very Bad Things, and Vondie Curtis Hall's Gridlock'd.
Outside of the recording and film worlds, Mr. Copeland has been involved in a diverse group of projects. He composed King Lear for the San Francisco Ballet, and completed a commission for the Cleveland Opera, Holy Blood and Crescent Moon. The latter was performed with a 90-piece orchestra and a 60-member chorus. He was commissioned by UK Channel 4 as part of that network's new opera series, Horse Opera. Based on the original play Cowboys by Anne Caulfield with a libretto written by British opera director Jonathan Moore, Horse Opera was filmed on location in Arizona. Mr. Copeland also wrote the music for a one-act opera (libretto by David Bamberger), The Cask of Amontillado, based on the short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Mr. Copeland added a further dimension to his live performance career by making his first appearance as a "Featured Guest Percussionist" with a major symphony orchestra, the Seattle Symphony. He performed a number of original compositions, including two world permieres entitled Solcheeka and The Stars That Played with Luck Joe's Cards.
