The maintenance of Central Thai cultural identity through hybrid music genres

Thailand has experienced rapid industrialisation, modernisation and cultural change since the mid-nineteenth century. Many Western cultural forms have been adopted into Thai life, including Western popular music. An external view of these processes and their results might suggest that Thailand has become quite ‘Western’. However, closer analysis reveals that elements of foreign cultures have long been adopted and adapted into Thai culture, and used as social capital to build an image of modernity and cosmopolitan sophistication. One of the adaptations made has been the fusion of Western genres with Thai ones, to form new hybrid styles of music. One hybrid genre that has developed largely over the past half century is Dontri Thai Prayuk (‘modernised Thai music’), which fuses aspects of Western pop with elements of Central Thai classical music. As this paper demonstrates, clear patterns emerge in the way Thai musicians have maintained markers of Thai identity and fused them with Western elements that signify modernisation. Motivations behind this deliberate fusion of Thai and Western elements are explained by the theories of ‘musical accommodation’ and ‘acts of identity’ – that musicians will converge with or diverge from other music-cultures in order to gain approval or assert a separate identity, in ways that deliberately change the underlying rules of the source musics to form a new identity. Analysis of Dontri Thai Prayuk fusion music shows that it has changed the underlying rules of Thai classical and Western popular music to display a music-cultural identity that is Thai, yet modern.