L.A. Native Heads Thai Group Fong Nam : Music: Led by Los Angeles native Bruce Gaston, the band puts Thai and Western music ‘through a metamorphosis.’

Fong Nam. In Thai it means bubbles . It also means music with a message for a group of musicians in Bangkok led by Los Angeles native Bruce Gaston.

Gaston is the only foreign member of Fong Nam, a Thai band that creates innovative music within its country’s own musical culture. The group’s starting point is the classical Thai orchestra and its traditional musical construction. Western music then finds expression in that context and “when we fiddle around with form in an essential way, the music goes through a metamorphosis,” explains Gaston. “It emerges between traditional and modern.”

Fong Nam’s music contains strong social commentary as well. For example, its next album, “At the End of the Concrete Road,” is a Brechtian farce, according to Gaston. The musicians start with cliched musical forms, then add something to wake people up. They want to show that along the concrete road, symbolizing progress, there are ethical issues to confront. The moral questions are not easy, but Gaston never avoided difficult things.

Gaston, 42, an alumnus of USC where in the 1960s he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and master’s in music. During those years at USC, Gaston encountered two of the several teachers who affected his life profoundly.

One was Prof. Ingholf Dahl, whose lessons on the importance of memorization were to have a lasting influence on Gaston. “Dahl said the only music you own is what is in your head. He was a great one for memorizing.” Several years later in Thailand, Gaston would put memory to the test when he studied Thai traditional music.

The professor who changed his life, however, was Gwendolyn Koldofsky, one of Gaston’s piano teachers in graduate school. “My first love was composing. But, because of what she was as a woman, a persona and a musician, I couldn’t resist music.” He decided to become a professional musician, but his career plans were disrupted by the Vietnam War.

Gaston received the approval of his draft board to carry out alternative service as a conscientious objector. Because he saw the war as a U.S.-Asia drama, he chose work in Thailand to fulfill his obligation, knowing it would mean giving up his hope of a professional music career. Before Gaston could summon the courage to go, he left school and went to live in a tree house in Mendocino for six months. His mother still thinks he spent that time living in a rented room in a gas station practicing the piano.

During the many weeks he spent looking out of the tree house at the Pacific Ocean, Gaston considered the work of John Cage, his role model. Cage’s idea of music as a spiritual manifestation is very important, even essential, to Gaston, who finally decided that, “If art is like a beacon, then I would go where that light doesn’t reach.” He went back to USC to give his master’s recital. The next morning he left for Thailand.

Gaston’s alternative service was to set up the school of music at Payap College, a new school in Chiang Mai built by missionaries of the Church of Christ in Thailand, an affiliate of the Presbyterian Church. Over the next 10 years, Gaston would develop a curriculum, establish the department and obtain official approval to award the first degrees in music in Thailand. He now lectures in music and drama at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

Gaston began to study Thai music soon after he arrived in the country. Typically, he decided to learn the most difficult form, the music of the piphat percussion orchestra. Recorded history of such orchestras goes back at least 700 years, but piphat music is dying out because of its difficulty. Although he now plays an assortment of piphat instruments, Gaston focused his early studies on the khong wong yai, a circle of 16 gongs. He also insisted on learning to play it the traditional way, as a Thai musician would, by memorizing the music.

Even more important in Thai music, however, is the human relationship between the teacher and student. “You must get to know and love the teacher before you can get to know and love the music,” he said. Instruction then comes out of that close association rather than from method, especially in the arts. The special nurturing environment enables a teacher to gauge the progress of a pupil’s learning, so only when the time is right will each new lesson be given.

Gaston said that ethnomusicologists who come to Thailand to do research usually “miss the boat.” They don’t stay long enough to develop the necessary, almost family relationship between the teacher and student. They also tend to content themselves with informants who simply answer their questions. Because Thai masters often will not tell them if they are asking the wrong questions, the researchers may never get the right answers. A teacher will show a pupil how to ask the correct questions.

Fong Nam was the answer for Gaston. The ensemble, although strongly slanted to the Thai side, was formed with the idea of bridging the gap between Thai classical and Western music. The objective was not, however, to concoct specific music, but to create a context where music could emerge from the special capabilities of the musicians. The only requirement was that the musicians be themselves.

Fong Nam has its critics. Traditionalists disapprove of fooling around with classical form, although nontraditionalists heap praise on Fong Nam for doing just that. Gaston says he wants to show that culture in every sense always changes. “It’s a living thing and if it doesn’t change, it will die.”