Tip! “Traditional music is usually indigenous but the performing and the graphic arts of a number of countries in Southeast Asia are deeply involved with the cultural and the political history of the region. We find that this pattern repeats itself in Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia as in Thailand where Hindu and Buddhist cultures have intermingled and prevailed in the past and in many cases still continue to do so.

Historians think that the Thai people left their original homeland outside the Southern borders of China when the Mongolians started their incursions into China during the thirteenth century AD. They arrived in today's Thailand, the "rice-bowl" of Southeast Asia, to establish a new kingdom of their own. There they came in direct contact with the Khmer civilisation which was the greatest in Southeast Asia at that time. The remains of the cultural achievements of the Khmer people can still be seen in Southeast Asian temple complexes and sculptures as also in dances and dance-dramas. For instance, the Thai epic Ramakien which is presented as paintings and stone reliefs on temple walls can also be seen as dance-dramas, involving the car-lier political and cultural history of the country. Although Ramakien is often compared with its Indian counterpart, the Sanskrit Ramayana by Valmiki, Ramakien cannot be described as a direct translation of the Indian epic. Sometimes the stories of the major episodes in the Thai version of the epic have been edited to fit the Thai requirements and the names of the important characters have been altered to suit the Thai sensibilities.

In order to make an objective comparison between the Sanskrit Ramayana and the Thai Ramakien, we can safely suggest that it is an adaptation of the Sanskrit epic for presenting the political and cultural identity of Thailand when it emerged as a new force in Southeast Asia. As also in the Indian epic, the Thai Ramakien portrays the country's ruler as a God-king fighting the forces of evil. Possibly, this reflects the desire of the Thais to establish the new country and its political and cultural identity as close as possible to the Khmer civilisation and its achievements as a cultural giant in Southeast Asia, when the Thais arrived in Southeast Asia with the aggressive purpose of encroaching into a foreign territory.

As in most countries of Asia, the Thai music consists of two distinct features: the folk songs and dances which belong to the village traditions and the Piphat orchestra with its complex structure, no doubt developed and played for the elite, both in villages and towns. The village music in the main is melodic, with songs and dances accompanied by woodwind and stringed instruments as well as drums and metal percussion instruments for providing the rhythm. The Piphat band, on the other hand, employs a rich collection of percussion instruments Piphat orchestra belonging to the metallophone and the xylophone families and played with drums, gongs and cymbals. These are divided into two sections, one providing the melody and the other the rhythm. Sometimes the orchestra is led by a single wood-wind instrument called the Pi Nai which belongs to the oboe family of instruments. The music is played in a diatonic scale with seven equidistant notes but without any semitones between the steps of the octave. The record begins with the music of the Piphat orchestra played for Ramakien, the epic which has represented the political and the cultural history of Thailand since ancient times.” - Deben Bhattacharya