Crossover Artist

A neuroscientist and musician unites his two passions.

- By Burkhard Bilger

Luk Kop didn’t seem to have the makings of a musical prodigy. He didn’t hum made-up tunes to himself as a youngster or shake his head when someone sang flat. He didn’t build instruments out of sticks and gourds or blow trumpet solos as a five-year-old. 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. 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’d been deemed too truculent to mix with tourists.

Soldier was in Thailand to recruit musicians for an elephant orchestra. He had hit upon the idea with Richard Lair, a conservationist and adviser at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, where Luk Kop lived. 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. 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. The results were exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and auctioned off at Christie’s for more than thirty thousand dollars. One critic compared them to Abstract Expressionism. But bright colors on a canvas are easy to like; music is a harder sell. To anyone other than a parent, a grade-school orchestra sounds like a crate of instruments falling down a staircase. Why would elephants be any better?