In the 20 years since a Syracuse zookeeper first encouraged an elephant's artistic impulses, pachyderm paintings have become fundraising fixtures at zoos. Now the debut CD of the Thai Elephant Orchestra is scheduled for release this month. The band 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, to be released by the New York-based Mulatta Records. Ancient Romans and Asian mahouts, or elephant handlers, have noted elephants' ability to distinguish melodies, and today's circus elephants follow musical cues. In 1957, a German scientist, Bernard Rensch, reported in Scientific American that his test elephant could distinguish 12 musical tones and could remember simple melodies even when played on different instruments, at different pitches, timbres and meters. She still recognized the tones a year and a half later. There have been commercial ventures, too.