Character and Expressivity in the Sacred Naphat Music of Thailand

The wai khru ceremony (in which homage is paid to Hindu deities as divine teachers) is considered a mysterious and exclusive space of Thai tradition which sits at the heart of many forms of artistic practice. The soundscape created by the piphat ensemble is at the centre of this ritual, where naphat music is treated as a sacred device suggesting the imagined appearance of Hindu deities: sacrifice is offered, and blessing and good fortune is asked for. This thesis scrutinises the details of this music from the perspective of a cultural insider, focusing on the manifestations of musical expressivity associated with divine qualities, and how Thai underlying conceptual models are made manifest in art. The melodic core of the repertoire, played by the khong wong yai, is analysed in terms of grammar and affective syntax found within Thai musical practice by reference to examples from forty individual pieces of music.
Affective expressivities of the music are associated with two particular modes, the demonic and the deva, that are governed by the concept of thang. This process involves a complex cooperation between expressivity and how that may be constituted in musical terms, with a cultural insider’s perspective reliant on known patterns of musical cognition against which an ambiguous expressivity is created through a process of distortion. Through the examination of this process, a quality of the divine in this music can be identified, involving a projection of the fantastical in relation to ambiguous expression; the music thus emerges as a uniquely subtle use of compositional methods founded within Thai musical theory.