May 31, 2001
Thai Elephants Rock!
Well, it's not exactly the kind of music you would hear on the top
40 radio stations, but elephants do have the ability to play music.
Now the debut CD of the Thai Elephant Orchestra is being released
on
Mulatta
Records.
The project is the brainchild of Richard Lair, an American expatriate
who has worked with elephants for 23 years and written an encyclopedic
United Nations study of Asia's captive elephants, and David Sulzer,
a neurologist who heads Columbia University's Sulzer Laboratory and
works as a composer and producer under the name Dave Soldier.
Together they organized six young pachyderm at the Thai Elephant Conservation
Center, a former government logging camp near the town of Lampang, where
elephants now earn their keep by giving rides, demonstrating logging
skills and painting pictures for tourists. Elephants are natural candidates
for music-making. Their hearing is much keener than their sight, and
they employ a vast range of vocalizations, many of which are heard on
their CD.
The Thai elephants play traditional Thai instruments - slit drums,
a gong hammered from a sawmill blade, a diddly-bow bass and xylophone-like
renats - and a thundersheet and harmonicas.
Mr. Sulzer said he and Mr. Lair merely showed the elephants how to
make the sounds, cued them to start and stop, and let them play as they
wished. After five practice sessions, they started recording. Mr. Sulzer
admits he was skeptical at first. "I thought we would just train
elephants to hit something, and I would tape that and have to paste
it together with other things." Instead, he recorded the performances
intact, without overdubbing, in a teak grove, pausing only when outside
noises intruded.
The proceeds from the CD will go to a milk bank for orphaned elephants and a school to improve mahout training - although Mr. Lair concedes that "profits are highly theoretical at this point." Nonetheless, Mr. Lair, who not only advises the Conservation Center but also trained the elephants for the Disney movie "Dumbo Drop," is sensitive to any charges of exploitation. Elephants should not be "incarcerated and made to do slave labor," he writes in the new CD's liner notes. With habitat vanishing and logging banned in Thailand, however, there's little alternative to tourist-camp work. At least, he says, making "gorgeous noises of their own volition" is light and pleasurable duty: "What better job than to be in the prison band?"
Mr. Lair and Mr. Sulzer are devising new instruments and seeking new talent. They say one 3-year-old has already proved a prodigy, and another elephant camp is trying to develop an orchestra. Meanwhile, a second, "easy-listening" recording, "code-named the `Schlock CD," is on the way, Mr. Lair writes, mixed to be accessible to a wider audience.
This article came from the NY Times.
