LAMPANG – The Thai Elephant
Orchestra is, remarkably, just what it sounds like. At a conservation center in
Thailand, made for former work animals with nowhere to go, a group of elephants
has been assembled and trained to play enormous percussion instruments,
holding
mallets in their trunks and sometimes trumpeting along.
David
Sulzer — known in the music world as Dave Soldier — is a neuroscientist at
Columbia University, a composer and the co-founder of the orchestra.
Thai Elephant Orchestra
co-founder David Sulzer (bottom center, in red) poses with the animals and
their mahouts, or keepers
“Elephants like to listen to music: If you
play music they’ll come over, and in the morning when the mahouts take them out
of the jungle, they sing to to calm them down,” Sulzer tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden.
“So what we came up with was, well, maybe if we made ergonomic instruments that
would be easy for elephants to play — for instance, marimbas and drums that are
giant — perhaps they would play music.”
Among
those instruments is a sort of oversized xylophone that Sulzer built in a metal
shop in Lampang, using the music he heard locally as a guide.
“The
idea here was to get the instruments to sound like traditional Thai
instruments, and make music that sounds like Thai music,” he says. “That
instrument … is using a Thai scale, a northern Thai scale. And when Thai people
hear it, they say, ‘Oh, that sounds like some of the music that we play in the
Buddhist temples up north.’”
The
Thai Elephant Orchestra has produced three albums. Sulzer says that these days,
when the elephants’ musicality is questioned, he has an answer ready.
“What
you do is you play some of the music to your friends, to an audience,” Sulzer
says. “We did this once to a professional music critic from The New
York Times, who got pretty upset with me afterwards. And you say, ‘Who’s
playing? Is this music?’ And they’ll say, ‘Of course it’s music.’ So far,
everyone has. You ask them to guess which group it is; that particular music
critic eventually said, ‘I bet it’s a new music group from Asia.’ I said, ‘You
got it.’”
See
video-clip Elephant
Orchestra
(chiangraitimes.com)