Elephants in Human Music: A History of Encounters Through Western Culture
Elephants and human music across the centuries
Throughout different cultures and historical periods, elephants have been linked to human music in varied ways. This exploration focuses primarily on how Western culture has connected elephants with music and how those bonds, as well as specific encounters between humans and elephants, have been shaped or deepened by Western musical traditions.
Several key publications have used the concept of "encounters" when discussing human-animal interactions. Tom Tyler, in his introduction to a collection edited by Tyler and Rossini, demonstrated that human encounters with animals have covered a broad spectrum — from hostile to cooperative — while also highlighting the idea of agonistic encounters as Michel Foucault envisioned them (1–2). Tyler notes, "The camel has long been portrayed as an irritable, ill-tempered creature, whose relations with others are fractious and antagonistic. Foucault highlighted the distinction, however, between antagonism and agonism …" (1).
This draws on Foucault's explanation of agonism found in "The Subject and Power":
At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an "agonism" — of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. (790)
Foucault originally directed his ideas solely at humans, but Tyler's extension of agonism to interactions between different species proves highly persuasive. The camel in question comes from Rudyard Kipling's tale "How the Camel Got His Hump," yet this agonistic framework can be applied to elephants as well. Historically, elephants have proven even more resistant to domestication than camels. Accordingly, the word "encounters" here connects to this agonistic interpretation, but it also refers to Barbara Smuts's 2001 article "Encounters with Animal Minds." In that piece, Smuts bridges the gap between scientific ethology and empathetic intersubjectivity:
Ample evidence exists that when people have extended opportunities to co-exist with wild animals, profound relationships based on mutual trust (as with the baboons), or at least mutual understanding (as with the chimpanzee Goblin) can develop. With such prolonged exposure, members of two different species can co-create shared conventions that help to regulate interspecies encounters (302).
Both of these perspectives on interspecies encounters stress the reciprocal nature of the interaction. Still, when we examine music's effects, we must recognize that Western culture has a strong tradition of constructing individual identity and subjectivity through aesthetic musical experiences and their capacity to shape a person's emotions, thoughts, and actions. So, as a musicologist, I will concentrate on how listening to organized sound and experiencing musical works functions as a means of constructing identity and difference while also keeping the definitions of animal encounters mentioned above in mind.
Our perception of and reflection on music constitutes one of the building blocks by which we define ourselves as Western cultural beings. Do elephants as participants in human-animal cultures undergo similar — or at least analogous — processes? What occurs when elephants hear human music? What happens when they must perform along with it? How does applying the idea of a listening subject to nonhumans challenge that concept itself?
A recent artwork tackling these questions is the 2014 documentary Music for Elephants, directed by Amanda Feldon. It features, among others, the British pianist Paul Barton and the retired Thai working elephant Pla-Ra. Pla-Ra lost his sight due to his work in the timber industry, and his former owner cut off and sold his tusks. In an interview early in the film, Barton describes how he would play piano for Pla-Ra and how the 45-year-old elephant would stop eating and listen — for example, to the slow movement of Beethoven's Pathétique. Viewers also watch Barton and Pla-Ra face each other, Barton playing a flute while Pla-Ra listens. Barton comments on several of these encounters:
Each time I played music for Pla-Ra — I would play sometimes in the forest at night, I would play sometimes the flute, or piano — and each time, there was an identical reaction: Pla-Ra would stand for a while, and then he would curl his trunk and hold his trunk in his mouth until the piece was over. No matter how long that piece was, he would stay like that, and we could see on the video his trunk was trembling. As soon as I stopped, he would let his trunk out and reach out for the musical instrument, and you could touch his trunk, and that would be it. But the mahouts said that was the only time he did that. They had never seen him doing that before.
Feldon's film contains many layers of meaning concerning cultural human-animal relationships, dealing with themes of pleasure, guilt, exploitation, and reconciliation. Here I wish to take the described scene as a starting point for exploring the phenomenon of elephants as audiences and the construction of elephant subjectivities through making them listen to and react to human music.
Although Paul Barton's method of creating music for elephants has unique qualities, it is not fundamentally new. In fact, ever since elephants appeared in Western culture, music has played a role in integrating these seemingly monstrous and foreign creatures into existing frameworks. Before turning to this specific musical discourse, it is worth considering the broader history of human-elephant interactions in the West.
Going back to antiquity, we see that elephants as a species appeared in the classical world rather late. Otto Körner, in his exhaustive work on Homeric animals, bluntly notes that the Homeric Greeks apparently knew nothing about elephants (53). The soldiers of Alexander the Great were the first Europeans to encounter the devastating effect of war elephants. This resulted in the unusual situation where Roman and Hellenistic thinkers could not build on a classical Greek discourse about elephants. Unlike many other animal species, these pachyderms were constructed as cultural beings from scratch during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, which produced an extraordinary level of ambiguity.
Jo-Ann Shelton has shown that Roman citizens largely perceived elephants as enemies:
Like other wild species, such as lions and bears, elephants were placed in arenas and killed in spectacles which demonstrated the Romans' ability to dominate nature. In these situations, the animals were looked upon as representatives of a natural world which was wild, alien and hostile to human endeavors, and which therefore deserved to be destroyed. ("Elephants as Enemies in Ancient Rome" 5).
This status of enemy stemmed from several factors. Elephants were never fully domesticated, always remaining part of the realm of wild animals, generally seen as adversaries of both human societies and domesticated animals. Moreover, as war elephants, they fought alongside Rome's most dangerous foes, such as Pyrrhus and Hannibal. Killing elephants in war or, after taking them prisoner, in arenas demonstrated control over nature while also crushing the military strength of Rome's opponents.
On the other hand, Aelian, in his On the Characteristics of Animals, offers a different perspective:
11. Touching the sagacity of Elephants I have spoken elsewhere; and further, I have spoken too of the manner of hunting them, mentioning but a few of the numerous facts recorded by others. For the present I intend to speak of their sense for music and their readiness to obey and their aptitude for learning things which are difficult even for mankind, to say nothing of so huge an animal and one hitherto so fierce to encounter. The movements of a chorus, the steps of a dance, how to march in time, how to enjoy the sound of flutes, how to distinguish different notes, when to slacken pace as permitted or when to quicken at command — all these things the Elephant has learnt and knows how to do, and does accurately without making mistakes. Thus, while nature has created him to be the largest of animals, learning has rendered him the most gentle and docile. (101–103)
Comparing Shelton's and Aelian's positions reveals the ambiguous relationship between elephants and music in ancient Rome. According to Shelton, the subjugation of elephants to torture and killing is linked to their subjugation to human music through dancing, which served as a way to ridicule them ("Dancing and Dying" 474). We must remember that many Romans found amusement not only in making animals obey, listen, and perform to human expressions, but also in watching the killing and torture of animals — and humans — in the arena.
Leaving the Roman circuses and arenas briefly, let us consider performative situations and power relations in Western music more broadly. In many regions of the world, music is performed as a social interaction among active participants. Only the specific European tradition has created such a clear divide between musicians and listeners. As noted earlier, being part of an audience and gaining experience and expertise as a listener in this tradition contributes to the constructed identity of a cultured person. The situation becomes even more complex: within this dichotomous performer-audience model, relationships tend to be either more horizontal or more vertical. In simple terms, when the relationship between performers and audience is horizontal, the social practice of making music does not — or does not obviously — exert power over the participants. When the relationship is vertical, music — or more precisely, the social practice of musical performance — establishes a hierarchy. Importantly, in various cultural contexts this hierarchy can place either the performers or the audience at the top of the aesthetic and social order. In some cases, such as that of court musicians in the early modern period, the audience dominates the performers. In other historical situations, such as the Romantic era of the 19th century with its cult of the virtuoso and its religious undertones, the performers dominate their audience.
Returning to the specific case of music for elephants, classical sources suggest a deep connection between killing elephants and subjecting them to music, while at the same time musical experience seems capable of elevating elephants to a higher cultural status. This ambiguity may not be unique to Roman history but might represent a hidden leitmotif in human musical education of elephants. Robert Delort, in The Life and Lore of the Elephant, proposes a progression from the murderous Roman arena to the menageries and circuses of the 19th century: "This affinity with people was particularly obvious on stage, where elephants struck ludicrous or clownish poses and mimicked audiences that reacted, not with primitive savagery and bloodlust, but with the benign gentleness of laughter." (92) One may reasonably question whether 19th-century human audiences were really so different from ancient Roman ones, as Delort suggests.
Nonetheless, there have been modern attempts to create a more horizontal relationship between human musicians and elephant audiences. In 1794, the Jardin des Plantes was founded in Paris. This institution was designed to transform the former royal menageries into a republican establishment with emancipatory aims. Four years later, in 1798, musicians from the newly founded Conservatoire of Paris gave a concert for the two elephants living there, Marguerite and Hanz. The performance was intended to test the reactions of musically inexperienced recipients and, seemingly, began a process of enculturation for the nonhuman listeners. Marguerite and Hanz were granted a rudimentary subjectivity by being raised to the status of concert audience. The musical experience the two elephants gained through their encounter with human music can be quite easily seen as a form of acquiring individuality. The concert is well documented in Georges Toscan's article from the Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique of 1798. Toscan considered the concert a scientific experiment, and he preferred this ethological approach to anatomical research, especially to vivisection: "[…] je crois qu'il est plus raisonnable, et sur-tout plus humain, d'etudier les ressorts et les fonctions de la vie dans la vie même, que de les aller chercher dans la mort, ou dans les convulsions d'un animal expirant" (257).
The two elephants in the Jardin des Plantes had been brought from the Netherlands. Originally named Parkie (a female) and Hans, they were renamed Marguerite and Hanz (with a 'z'). On this occasion, they listened to several compositions, including an opera excerpt by Gluck and a symphony by Haydn, as well as popular and revolutionary songs. The ensemble used string and wind instruments, sometimes together with singers. According to Toscan, the elephants showed varying reactions to the pieces, from indifference to full excitement. The intensity of emotional impact even seemed to shift when a composition was transposed to a different key.
James H. Johnson situates the concert for the two elephants within the context of changing audience attitudes from the French ancien régime to the Romantic era (129–132). Johnson proposes that revolutionary aesthetics sought to rediscover the ancient power of music to arouse citizens to political and military action on behalf of the state. This goal, he suggests, led to testing sentient but culturally naive elephants and their responses to music. (Of course, the assumption that the elephants were culturally naive is anthropocentric, since it implies the existence of human cultures by default, but not of elephant cultures.) Jeffrey Kallberg adds the dimension of the relationship between music and sex, which itself is political (132–134). Shortly after the concert, the elephants' keeper reportedly witnessed the pair having sex for the first time. However, his description of the act being performed in a missionary position makes his account unlikely — again a case of anthropocentric projection. Jean-Pierre-Louis Houel, in his 1803 book Histoire naturelle des deux elephants, recounts Toscan's article from the Décade philosophique and even offers illustrations of this imagined intercourse. Interestingly, Houel places Toscan's entire documentation within the broader context of other species-specific traits of elephants.
Toscan favored the concert as an experiment in empirical aesthetics and compared it favorably to the Cartesian willingness to dissect dead and living animals for physiological research. Bearing in mind this ambiguous relationship between ethology, physiology, and vivisection, it may be legitimate to trace a historical line from the Roman discourse — with its complex link between elephants, music, and killing — to comparable connections in the 19th century. While Parkie/Marguerite and Hans/Hanz lived in confinement without being directly killed by humans at any specific point, for elephants in 19th-century Western culture this was more the exception than the rule. The history of menageries, traveling shows, theaters, and circuses during that period is shockingly full of elephants who were stars in their youth and early adulthood and were later killed for one reason or another.
The 1798 concert can also be seen as an early challenge to speciesist assumptions that only humans respond to music or can have aesthetic experiences. For me, it seems unavoidable to connect this with the fact that two successors of Marguerite and Hanz — Castor and Pollux, who also lived in the Jardin des Plantes — were killed and eaten by their fellow citizens during the siege of Paris at the end of 1870. Another example of a tragic career end is the world-famous Jumbo, who was sold from the United Kingdom to the United States (Oettermann 186–188). Jumbo died violently in a train accident (86), yet at the same time inspired — with the name misspelled as Jimbo, which in French sounds quite similar to Jumbo with a 'u' — Claude Debussy's peaceful and affectionate piano piece "Jimbo's Lullaby" from the suite Children's Corner. There are countless other biographies of elephants from the 19th and early 20th centuries that range from enculturation of individual elephants to accidental or even intentional reduction of them back to the status of wild, and thus unprotected, beasts. Human-elephant encounters sometimes seem capable of blurring the line between humans and nonhuman animals regarding cultural phenomena, yet they can easily revert to a regressive re-animalization of elephants — turning them from proto-cultural beings back into savage enemies of human culture.
This historical context provides the background for contemporary encounters between elephants and humans in music. Paul Barton, a pianist who makes music for elephants in sanctuaries, clearly follows an emancipatory concept. He avoids playing pianos with ivory keys, sees the past exploitation of elephants in the ivory and timber industries as a historic human guilt, and intends to demonstrate to elephants that humans have something good to offer by playing music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven. However, there are other recent examples of presenting music to elephants that have been discussed more controversially. In 2015, the Belgian zoo Pairi Daiza claimed that elephants "danced" or swayed in unison as musicians performed in front of them. A video of this situation was published on the zoo's Facebook page ("Are These Elephants Really Dancing to Classical Music?"). It is difficult to tell just from watching the footage whether we are witnessing a case of entrainment to the rhythm of the music or something else entirely.
whether this constitutes a genuine response to the music itself, or merely signs of captivity-induced neurosis that occasionally align with the musical sounds. The claim by violinist Eleanor Bartsch raises further questions: “Me warming up for my performance of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, WI. I decided to go outside and play a bit for Kelly and Viola, 44 and 45 year-old elephants that have lived together for most of their lives. I found out that elephants REALLY like Bach…” Once again, the evidence comes from video posted online — this time on YouTube in 2014 (Bartsch).
The video’s release drew sharp criticism from the animal advocacy group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), which countered with “No, These Elephants Aren’t Dancing.” PETA included footage showing the elephants’ swaying as a recurring symptom of mental illness stemming from captivity (O’Connor).
Overall, a tradition spanning at least two thousand years appears to attribute to elephants the standing of enculturated beings capable of receiving music. Yet the elephants’ status as cultural creatures who experience aesthetics and engage in musical reflection is never fixed or guaranteed in these accounts. In narrative after narrative, it is humans who decide whether to shape the story as one of harmonious or agonistic encounter, or to revert it into an antagonistic and potentially destructive frame. Since music-making unfolds in time, the benefits elephants might derive from contact with human music remain precarious — liable to vanish as swiftly as a sound fades into the air.