{"id":733,"date":"2001-04-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-04-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/04\/25\/2001-04-25-elephant-band-gets-rave-reviews\/"},"modified":"2001-04-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-04-25T12:00:00","slug":"2001-04-25-elephant-band-gets-rave-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2001\/04\/25\/2001-04-25-elephant-band-gets-rave-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Elephant Band Gets Rave Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/aponline\/arts\/AP-Pachyderm-Paganinis.html?pagewanted=print\">GO TO SOURCE<\/A><\/P><br \/>\n<P><\/p>\n<p>LAMPANG, THAILAND, April, 23, 2001: 59-year-old American Richard Lair, aka Professor Elephant, is the conductor of the world&#8217;s first and only elephant orchestra comprising 12 jumbos on a wide range of ingenious percussion, string and woodwind instruments. While Phangkhawt and her fellow musicians are unlikely to put the Vienna Philharmonic out of business, their 19-track compact disc got a warm review from Robert Halliday, classical music critic for the Bangkok Post. &#8220;The results of this inter-species musical experiment are, at their best, so communicative that I defy listeners unfamiliar with the circumstances to spot them as non-human in origin.&#8221; Lair and fellow conservationists hope the CD will draw attention to the tragedy of Thailand&#8217;s domestic elephant population, which is down to 2,500 from some 100,000 a century ago. Funds garnered through the elephants&#8217; performances and CD go back into conservation of the species. So after music, painting and an occasional Hollywood role, what can the elephants do for an encore? &#8220;The next step,&#8221; says Lair, &#8220;is to teach them how to write novels.&#8221;<br \/>\n<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GO TO SOURCE LAMPANG, THAILAND, April, 23, 2001: 59-year-old American Richard Lair, aka Professor Elephant, is the conductor of the,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}