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Switzerlandia
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
That yodeling happens everywhere is best illustrated by profiling the rest of the world’s many cradles of yodelinglike vocalizations. We commence with Switzerland and its Alpine neighbors, Germany and Austria, renowned locations of much yodeling. But as we move away from the Alps the delight and astonishment will only grow the farther we find ourselves—Korea, Taiwan!—from the clichéd and presumed locations of yodeling. Switzerland, like other nations, does not really exist except in the minds of those who need it most: tourists and nationalists and those who sell the production of its image. And yet, Switzerland remains a spiritual center for yodeling. Switzerland hosts a perpetual tug-of-war, pitting modern against traditional. Neither can admit that they’re both right and wrong in this debate. That’s just the way of the world. Words like “culture,” “nationality,” and “identity” are flexible and fluid. There is no pure folk music. Switzerland is both enhanced and encumbered by the honed myths that consumers consume. By giving them what they want “we” all become a little less authentic. It’s precisely here that yodeling offers its lingua franca, an olive branch toward a more accepting culture—locally, nationally, and internationally. The Swiss Yodeler Federation (Y, Eidgenössicher Jodler Verband [EJV]) still believes the yodel developed as an idyllic expression of mankind’s relation to nature and the beyond. “Our yodel was born in the mountains through the shouting of one person to another.”1 The Swiss produce melancholy yodeling—“Swiss blues”—which has not always been in favor but always Switzerlandia For the Alpine people, roaring loudly with their thunderous voices, cannot bring forth the proper sweetness of the melody, because the savage barbarity of their drunken throats, while endeavoring with inflections and repercussions and diphthongs of diaphonies to utter a gentle strain, through its natural noisiness proffers only unmodulated sounds like farm carts clumsily creaking up a rutted hill. —Johannes Diaconus, quoted in Timothy McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song My impression of the tradition-bound hands-in-pocket stance that symbolizes the standardization one also sees on the covers of hundreds of jodelklub CDs. speaks of and to its surroundings. Manfred Bukofzer, in describing the development of polyphony, noted that “the vocal drones of the yodels in the Canton of Appenzell . . . are examples of great antiquity” and cited a fourteenth-century text describing the execution of a missionary and “how the ringing of the cowbells and the sound of the alphorn and yodels accompanied the ceremony of execution.”2 The lonely cowherd-farmer lives on in Swiss souls and continues to find expression in the most basic of yodels, the juutz, zäuerli, and other nonstrophic natuurjodels : löckler, kuhreihen, gradhäba, Talerschwinge, and the betruf, sung through a wooden holle (megaphone) so that the somewhat-deaf god can hear. Ululating Swiss pagans and shamans, confronting early Christian fanatics who insisted they sing their way or no way, appeased both their own gods and the Christians by choosing a “dual faith” approach as herders dressed their pagan gods to look more Christian. While hiking through the Alps and Dolomites, one notices the ubiquitous Christ shrines, representing villagers’ dual pagan-Christian veneration of the mountains. According to an online forum, “When Pope John XXII in complained that ecclesiastical music is now performed with semibreves and minimas, and pestered with these short notes, he was . . . condemning the breaking up of long sustained notes into shorter and even syncopated note values, as in hocketing.”3 Hocketing is a global technique, involving rapid alternations of notes or short phrases usually between two vocalists, involving one resting while the other vocalizes/yodels. Church and State sometimes exacerbate what Max Weber called Entzauberung (disenchantment) by suppressing native expression associated with magic. The church engaged in witch hunts to ensure that locals refocused their communications away from ancestral spirits, forces, and mountains, via yodeling, singing, and drumming , and directed it at the one and only Christian god. Despite church suppression, mediatization, and EJV bureaucratization, Switzerland’s yodels remain diverse. The ancient nonstrophic natuurjodels (also including alpsegen , viehlöckler, and hirtenrufe) survive, while the lessprimitive , popular strophic (verse-yodel chorus) spiritual songs, betrufs, work songs, heimatlieder, and jodellieder continue to thrive. The natuurjodel resembles its rootsy relative the ruf (holler) and purportedly uses “Alphorn-Fa,” a pure, natural ur-tone between C-sharp and F. This unspoiled, spontaneous melody is at the root of all Swiss vocalization , creating a purported...