Elephants Lumber to a Different Tune

What do you do with an out-of-work elephant? If you’re Richard Lair, you teach it to play music.

It’s no joke.

With Phangkhwat on the gong and Luuk Kob on the one-stringed diddley bow, the world’s first elephant orchestra has begun producing its distinctive brand of music here in northern Thailand. Call it the Pachyderm Philharmonic.

The heavyweight musicians create a unique sound--some might call it noise--that has attracted worldwide attention to the plight of Thailand’s dwindling elephant population.

“However sad it may be, virtually all elephants in Thailand must work hard for a living,” says Lair, a San Francisco native and elephant expert. “These elephants are unjustly incarcerated and made to do slave labor--but what better job than to be in the prison band?”

The elephants perform their music in shows at the government-sponsored Thai Elephant Conservation Center outside Lampang. Some of the multitalented pachyderms also create art by holding a paintbrush in their trunks, while others demonstrate the log-moving skills they once used in traditional logging operations.

Elephants were once an essential part of the Thai economy. Used widely for transportation and to help harvest timber in the dense jungle, they numbered 100,000 a century ago. Today, the elephant remains a national symbol, but only about 5,500 are left in Thailand, including roughly 1,500 in the wild.

Robert Mather, who heads the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Thailand office, says the music and painting by the center’s elephants benefit the species by helping to raise funds for its conservation.

He notes that the Asian elephant is in greater jeopardy than the African elephant, which often gets more attention from the public. An estimated 500,000 African elephants exist, he says. Furthermore, few herds of Asian elephants are large enough to sustain the genetic diversity needed to ensure the species’ long-term future.

“While a lot of attention has been focused on the African elephant,” Mather says, “the status of the Asian elephant is much worse.”

Idea Was Born Over a Bottle of Scotch

Lair, known in these parts as Professor Elephant, is a college dropout and onetime hippie who has devoted more than two decades to the giant creatures. An advisor to the conservation center, he wrote “Gone Astray,” the definitive book on the Asian elephant in domesticity, and trained elephants for the Disney movie “Operation Dumbo Drop.”

He and composer Dave Soldier came up with the orchestra idea when they met in 1999 during Lair’s first trip to the United States in 19 years. In everyday life, Soldier is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he studies brain function and uses his real name, David Sulzer.

Over a bottle of scotch one night in New York, the two began wondering whether elephants could play music. The question turned into an inspiration.

Soldier and several friends from the music world came to Thailand and, with Lair, made, bought or borrowed 20 kinds of instruments for the elephants to try. These included harmonicas, drums and a gong made from a circular saw blade confiscated from an illegal logging operation.

The humans constructed giant renats, which are a sort of Thai xylophone; a thunder sheet, made of metal and struck with a mallet; and the diddley bow, a large single-stringed instrument that sounds a bit like an electric bass.

“The elephants took easily to the harmonica, which sparked the first elephant music fad,” Soldier recounts in cover notes for a CD of the elephants’ music. “One morning I arrived to hear the sound of harmonicas from all around--from the hills and the river. The elephants were walking in from the forest playing harmonicas, which they hold easily in the tip of their trunks.”

To create a Thai sound, Soldier chose a musical scale used in traditional Thai music and added a tinge of American blues. He and Lair made no attempt to teach the elephants human songs but let them play whatever they wanted. Sometimes the result is cacophony. But sometimes it’s quite melodic and soothing in its spareness.

Lair and Soldier began recording the elephant music last year and have released two CDs. Some listeners say the elephants’ sound is similar to a style of music played in Thai temples.

“We’ll play anywhere for free,” Lair jokes. “Weddings. Bar mitzvahs. They just have to provide the transportation and the food.”

Lair says that during his first 15 years of working to help the species, he felt like “a voice in the wilderness.” But the musical elephants have struck a chord with humans and attracted attention from around the world.

Media outlets ranging from “60 Minutes” to Ranger Rick magazine and National Public Radio have been here to prepare stories. So have CNN, the BBC and television crews from Denmark, Germany and Japan. People magazine dressed Lair in a tuxedo to take his picture conducting the orchestra. Actress Meg Ryan came in June to shoot part of a PBS documentary about Thailand’s elephants.

“When you have 48 elephants and the world’s first elephant orchestra, the world beats a path to your door,” Lair says.

Still, he says he would gladly forgo all the attention and set the animals free if he could. The problem is, few places are left for them to go.

4,000 Years of Job Experience on Resume

Humans have encroached on so much of the creatures’ habitat, he says, that Thailand’s remaining forests cannot support many more than the number already living in the wild.

Throughout the 13 countries of their range, only about 43,000 wild Asian elephants remain--more than half of them in India. There are about 16,000 domesticated elephants.

Humans began capturing elephants in Asia and putting them to work more than 4,000 years ago. Today, the Asian elephant is unique--an endangered animal that often works for a living.

In Thailand, the elephant has long been revered. Historically, so-called “white elephants” have been one of Thai royalty’s most important possessions and once led the way into battle. Although they’re not always white, their existence assures prosperity for the realm.

Elephants have never been domesticated in the traditional sense. Their long life span--almost as long as humans’--makes selective breeding impractical, because no person would live long enough to produce changes in the species’ makeup. Many captive elephants began their lives in the wild, and two-thirds of those that escape or are freed can survive without difficulty, Lair says.

“Clearly, a domesticated elephant is simply a wild animal in chains--but a wild animal frequently gentle and intelligent enough to be totally trustworthy as a baby-sitter to watch over human infants,” Lair writes in “Gone Astray.”

Progress Alters Long Relationship

During the last half-century--less than an elephant’s lifetime--progress has altered a relationship between human and animal that had lasted millenniums.

Today, elephants’ jobs in transportation have been taken over by cars and trucks. With the forests over-harvested, Thailand has banned logging, putting more elephants out of work.

About 1,000 elephants work in tourism, but many more have no legal means to support themselves. Some traditional Thai elephant trainers, known as mahouts, force their elephants to work in illegal logging. Others bring their elephants to Bangkok, the capital, to perform tricks or beg for food.

The Thai Elephant Conservation Center is something of an oasis for domesticated elephants. Besides the 48 elephants that the center keeps to give shows and rides to tourists, 30 sick and handicapped elephants live there, including victims of land mines and logging accidents.

It is the one place in Thailand that accepts any elephant in any condition. Some have arrived at the center addicted to the amphetamines they were fed to keep them hauling timber for illegal loggers. Three killer elephants live at the center, including one that killed 16 people.

The center also operates a mobile clinic that treats 500 elephants a year and a school that trains mahouts in the traditional ways of keeping elephants. Thailand’s king keeps six white elephants at the center.

The center is subsidized by the government, and other costs are partly offset by the sale of show tickets and the elephants’ paintings.

For the elephants, the chance to play music offers a challenge in an otherwise routine life. Some seem to enjoy it, say Soldier and Lair. And although some of the animals were reluctant to try the instruments, once they began, they wouldn’t stop.

Soldier says he has often been asked whether the elephants’ sounds are truly music. He suggests using the kind of test designed to determine if a computer has intelligence.

“Try playing the recording to people without telling them the identity of the performers, and then ask them if it’s music,” he says. “They may love it, or they may beg you to stop, but I think they will say, ‘Of course it’s music.’ ”

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To hear a selection from the Thai Elephant Orchestra, go to: https://www.latimes.com/elephants