RICHARD LAIR says it was a bottle of wine. Dave Soldier remembers whisky.
Either way, some form of alcohol was involved that night in 1999 when the two of
them dreamed up the Thai Elephant Orchestra.
In retrospect, once they had met, it was inevitable. Lair is obsessed with
Asian elephants, and has been since he was three years old. He’s been working at
the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre in northern Thailand for 20 years now.
Soldier on the other hand didn’t know much about elephants, but he does know
music. After he’s finished his day job at Columbia University in New York
investigating the neurochemistry of mice under his birth name of David Sulzer,
he spends his time composing and playing avant-garde music using his music
sobriquet Dave Soldier. Unusual music is his forte and he’s always up for a
challenge.
The idea still seemed good in the cold light of morning. After all, pachyderm
painters from Lair’s centre were already making their names in the art
world—elephant canvasses can sell for thousands of dollars in the right
galleries. If art, why not music? Soldier booked a ticket to Thailand and
started designing instruments to be played by this biggest of bands.
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He knew he couldn’t afford to build anything delicate. These instruments
would have to survive being pounded by 4-tonne musicians. They would be played
out of doors and would have to cope with sweltering humid summers, monsoonal
downpours and winter temperatures that could fall to just above freezing. They
would also need to sound good to the Thai ear—human as well as pachyderm.
And above all, the elephants would have to want to play them.
In January 2000, Soldier arrived in Lampang and the two bandleaders set to
work. Some of the instruments were disastrous. “If you put a flute in their
mouth they bite it in half,” says Soldier. The drum pedals were a non-starter
too, since elephants, it turns out, like to keep all four feet on the ground.
And they didn’t particularly take to the jumbo electronic keyboard either. So
much for tickling the ivories.
But when Soldier and Lair tried instruments the elephants could blow into
with their trunks or bash with a stick, the orchestra was born. Lining up in a
solemn row the centre’s elephants played thunder sheets and harmonicas,
xylophones and elephant sitars. They even managed an Asian wind instrument
called a khaen, although they had trouble holding it.
And the music sounded… good. Surprisingly good in fact. “I was amazed,”
says Soldier. “For myself as a weirdo composer I don’t mind if there’s cacophony
in the music. If it’s wild and woolly that’s fine by me. But the elephants seem
to like pretty music. They’re like my 4-year-old niece.”
He’s right. The music is pretty, in a weird sort of way. And it really is
more than, say, sea lions trained to honk car horns. Although the elephants are
told when to start and stop, the rest is up to them. In fact, when to stop is
pretty much up to them, since it’s hard to dictate such things to an
elephant.
The general plan is to start with one elephant, move into a duet then bring
in the drums. But, says Lair, it never goes quite like that. Often the elephants
either don’t start on time or they refuse to stop playing or a mallet gets
dropped. “I think that’s one of the reasons people like the music. It’s
initially unsettling because you’re used to centring in on one instrument and
using that as the substrate to filter the other sounds. The elephant music is so
random that you can’t do that—you have to give yourself over to it
entirely. Anything can happen.”
One young male, Poon, has become a virtuoso on the drums. “He’ll play
5-minute solos,” says Soldier. “They have themes, they have movement, and he
knows when he’s done. And when he’s done it sounds to you like the tune is done
too. And then he drops the stick and walks away.”
There is something uncomfortable, however, about getting elephants to do
something so obviously human. Lair and Soldier both feel it. “It’s not like they
would be doing it spontaneously,” Soldier admits. “We ask them to do it. If
people want to get offended for that reason then I actually agree with them. You
don’t want to have elephants mimicking human activities.”
But the elephants do need ways to make a living. Their numbers are plummeting
now that the logging work has dried up. As recently as 150 years ago there were
100,000 elephants in Thailand; now there are just a few thousand. The options in
South-East Asia are all bad: begging on the street, not having proper care or
working in illegal logging. “The possibility of returning them to the wild is
nil,” says Soldier. “There’s not enough wild there.”
Lair agrees: “When I started working with elephants 20 years ago they were
almost all still doing logging. Everything was a command—’Do this!’, `Do
that!’ Now we’re not just giving orders. We’re giving them freedom to do their
own thing. They shouldn’t be kept in captivity. They’re wild animals, they
belong off in the forest. For them to be even in our camp is like being in jail.
But if they’ve got to be in captivity what better than to be in a prison
˛ú˛ą˛Ô»ĺ?”
The band plays several times a day for visitors to the centre. And now the
elephants have a CD to their name. Their first recording effort is an arty
affair, with no overdubs or studio tricks to leaven the sounds. But Lair and
Soldier are also producing an easy-listening version, nicknamed the Schlock CD,
for a wider audience.
Even raw elephant music is surprisingly mellifluous. “I don’t listen to it
every night now, as I did at first,” says Lair. “But I still turn it on and it’s
just gorgeous. Hey, I love Beethoven’s 6th too but it’s sort of the same every
time you hear it. That’s just not true with elephant music. There’s this element
of spontaneity and surprise and lack of human pattern. It’s kind of
other-worldly. You know you’re not following something that was written
»ĺ´Ç·É˛Ô.”
Lair is partisan, of course. But he’s right that there’s something
extraordinary about listening to wild animals making music. Don’t just take it
from me, here’s what Amazon.com’s classical music editor Jason Verlinde had to
say: “All of it is entertaining, but the human-led tracks just can’t compete
with the inventive elephants and their ragged, slow-paced, and off-kilter
music-making. Granted, you probably won’t want to hear Phrathida, JoJo, and Luuk
Kob pounding away everyday, but the elephants probably feel the same way about
Cecil Taylor.”
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The Thai Elephant Orchestra CD is available from Mulatta Records,
www.mulatta.org. -
There’s more about elephant art and the work of the conservation centre at
www.elephantart.com -
For more about the plight of Asian domesticated elephants, see
Gone Astray by Richard Lair,
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (Bangkok,1997)