But Luk Kop didn’t need much encouragement. Soldier rewarded the elephants with apples and bananas, or petted their fat pink tongues, which some elephants love. Elephants tend to keep a steadier beat than humans do, a study by the neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel later found, and Luk Kop’s sense of timing was uncanny. And yet, when Soldier set one before him and handed him a stick, he grabbed it with his trunk and quickly learned how to wield it. Luk Kop had never touched a drum in his life. Within four years, sixteen elephants were playing a full orchestra’s worth of instruments. A metalworker in nearby Lampang built some marimbas and thunder sheets a Canadian artist designed a synthesizer that the elephants could play with their trunks and Soldier brought in bells, harmonicas, and mouth organs from northeastern Thailand. Then he mixed in more instruments and tunings. Initially, Soldier had all the instruments tuned to a C-sharp pentatonic scale, so they would sound good together. The blade of a huge circular saw that was abandoned by a tree poacher in the forest was turned into a gong. Working with Lair and the carpenters at the sanctuary, Soldier built an elephant-size xylophone, a drum, and a single-stringed instrument that looked like a washtub bass. It had to be operable without hands or fingers, and it had to be very large. Anything an elephant played had to be weatherproof and extremely durable. The first challenge was making instruments. When Soldier explained his plan to the elephant trainers at the sanctuary, they reacted with “slightly irritated bemusement,” he later recalled. But that didn’t mean they would make good musicians-at least of the sort that play in an orchestra. Studies had found that elephants could identify simple melodies and distinguish pitches as little as a half step apart. Some female elephants are both so intelligent and so even-tempered that villagers in Thailand have used them as babysitters. They’ve learned to pull plows, carry tree trunks, clear paths, and trample armies. Why would elephants be any better?Īsian elephants have been trained by humans for more than four thousand years. To anyone other than a parent, a grade-school orchestra sounds like a crate of instruments falling down a staircase. But bright colors on a canvas are easy to like music is a harder sell. One critic compared them to Abstract Expressionism. The results were exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and auctioned off at Christie’s for more than thirty thousand dollars. The Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid had recently taught some of the sanctuary’s animals to paint with oils by holding brushes in their trunks. In the spring of 1999, when Lair was on a research trip in New York, he and Soldier stayed up late one night at Soldier’s place in Chinatown, talking about elephant art. He had hit upon the idea with Richard Lair, a conservationist and adviser at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, where Luk Kop lived. Soldier was in Thailand to recruit musicians for an elephant orchestra. He’d been deemed too truculent to mix with tourists. When the composer and instrumentalist Dave Soldier first met him, in Thailand, in 2000, Luk Kop spent most of his time eating grass and hanging around with the other elephants. He had a brief moment of fame as a child actor, in the Disney film “Operation Dumbo Drop,” but grew into a sullen and ungainly teen. He didn’t build instruments out of sticks and gourds or blow trumpet solos as a five-year-old. He didn’t hum made-up tunes to himself as a youngster or shake his head when someone sang flat. Luk Kop didn’t seem to have the makings of a musical prodigy.
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