Yodel in Hi-Fi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica

Foreword

With Yodel in Hi-Fi, Bart Plantenga continues the extraordinary in-depth exploration begun in his earlier volume, Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World. The first volume had already been described (in the UTNE Reader) as “one of the most complete studies of any subject ever,” so why a second? Is yodeling really all that important, or is Plantenga only another nostalgia freak hot in trivial pursuit? Well, as I see it, yes, yodeling really is that important. And while Plantenga is refreshingly open to every manifestation of yodel-related trivia cum nostalgia to be found, he is also a very serious, diligent, and often remarkably astute scholar. His first book merely broached the topic, it would seem. This second one, equally rich in fact, fantasy, wit, and wisdom, fills in many of the essential details. My own studies of world music, guided by the insights of my mentor, Alan Lomax, have led me to regard yodeling in a very special light, as did he. Not only is it a “distinctive feature,” readily identifiable wherever found, it is also a uniquely ambitious and challenging bit of vocal art. So challenging, indeed, it seems highly unlikely anyone anywhere would simply decide, on one fine day, to give it a try, out of the blue and just for the heck of it, based on nothing more than, say, getting the attention of the fetching cowgirl over on the adjoining mountaintop . One might try a hoot or a holler—but a full fledged yodel? I don’t think so. A technique as complex as yodel, if not imbibed from infancy with mother’s milk, requires training and practice and is not likely to have been “independently invented” or even invented at all. For this reason, along with several others, which I won’t get into here, I’m convinced that yodeling, wherever it might be found, and under whatever circumstances, must be a survival of something very old indeed, reflecting, in the words of Trout Pomeroy (as quoted below), “ancestral forces within all of us.” But that’s me. I have a lot of pet theories, which might or might not make sense to anyone else. To his credit, Plantenga is open to all such notions and eager to explore as many as possible. Having some ideas of his own on this all important topic has not prevented him from delving into all the many others. As he informs us, yodeling has been thought to originate in bird calls, cattle calls, alphorn imitations, echoes (both alpine and forest), spells and incantations, the vocal harmonics of sacred chants, “the need to communicate over great distances” (e.g., from mountaintop to mountaintop), “the prelingual, precodified power of the voice as a stream of energy,” “an idyllic expression of mankind’s relation to nature and the beyond,” or, simply, the hooting and “hollering” of primate ancestors (my personal favorite), Alpine herders, Siberian herders, African Pygmies, Negro slaves, cowboys, Indians, babes in arms, and, as he himself suspects, any or all of the above. Foreword Victor Grauer ix Where Plantenga really comes into his own, however, is not so much with all his historical/ethnographic/ ethnomusicological research into ultimate origins and meanings, as valuable, interesting, and even inspiring as that may be, but his dogged, Ahab-like determination to track down every trace of yodeling wherever it might occur anywhere in the world and in whatever setting, whether it be tribal, folk, pop, high art, low art, kitsch, or downright corn. He is clearly both amused and mysti fied by this obsession: “I don’t know whether yodels seek me out or whether my brain has programmed my ears to scan everything from sirens to dog moans for yodeling.” In words that might constitute a veritable manifesto of epiglottal aficionadoism, he cries out to anyone who will listen: “Yodeling happens everywhere.” Out of curiosity, I decided to test this theory by doing a statistical search of the “Cantometrics” database to see exactly where yodeling was coded for in the , plus song sample compiled by Lomax, myself, and a few others as part of an ambitious project to systematically map the various vocal families of the world according to the distribution of various traits strewn among thirtyseven parameters of musical style. Here’s the result: Regions Sampled Percentage of yodel per sample African Foragers . Australian Foragers  American Hunters . Siberia . South America . Melanesia . Polynesia . Black Africa . Eastern Asia . Europe...