You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. What, one wonders, would the appropriate saying be at this time of crisis for so many orchestras? And although there aren't many monkeys who can play in an ensemble, they're not the only creatures who like peanuts.
Step forward...(drum roll, expectant pause)...the elephant orchestra!
No, this isn't a metaphor (though, OK, the bit about them taking jobs from human orchestral players is). The Thai Elephant Orchestra, based in Thailand is, well, an orchestra made up of elephants. "When we started people thought we were nuts," Dave Soldier, one of the humans behind the idea, told the cameras. No kidding.
But, as far as can be seen from the video footage, these animals can actually play. Which is to say, they gamely hit whatever instruments are put in front of them. But it's a long way from Carnival of the Animals. Soldier's co-founder, the American Richard Lair, is know locally as "Professor Elephant" and he runs the group from a conservation center in Lampang. The orchestra now has 22 instruments (no Steinway grands among them, unsurprisingly).
So what music is written for elephant? Not much - there is that elephant in Carnival, but that aside I'm stumped. Luckily, the Thai elephants play Thai music, not classical. One of the orchestra's informal tag lines nods to classical though - that the group "weighs three times as much as the Berlin Philharmonic."
Watch the footage. Judge for yourself. Personally, I now think it's a shame that not more music for the animals has been written. La Trunkiata, anybody? Le Nelly di Figaro?
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