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An Introduction to the Insane Logic of Yodeling
- University of Wisconsin Press
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because many of us decide by midlife that we’ve heard enough; we stop listening to (new) music and etch into the window to our fortresses a template that uses minimal knowledge and maximal attitude as its coordinates. This allows us to exude midlife qualm, regret, and spiritual conflict when confronted with the unexpected. Presumption, then, is an essential prerequisite in the cultural hierarchy of taste. Yodel in Hi-Fi spotlights the lively, living, contemporary , not-dead-not-dying, world of yodeling. Some of the yodelers are almost too enthusiastic to believe or too young to own a driver’s license, but old enough to have already been seen yodeling on YouTube by seventy-five million viewers. Singers will continue to yodel as a consequence of genetic predisposition, desire, skill, and the inspiration that lead to the personal manipulation of one’s medium to create something that speaks to people and continues to do so. Before Gauguin could really begin to paint, he unlearned everything he had learned about art up to that point. I’m thinking of something similar with yodeling. Our ears must be cut loose from our cerebral attics of cultural clutter, prejudice, and presumption. Yodeling Probably the weirdest yodel story ever involves jazz vocalist Leon Thomas, who literally fell upon yodeling. Picture this robust, renowned jazz vocalist at home, in a yoga headstand, when suddenly he remembers some guy he’s lent money to. From a headstand, he walks on his hands to the phone to dial this guy’s number. Thomas enters the bedroom doorway upside down; he notes that he suddenly “transcended. I was one place and my body was another. I dropped to the floor right on my face and my teeth went into my bottom lip. . . . So I couldn’t do my show with Pharoah [Sanders that night].” But Thomas ended up on stage anyway, hardly able to move his mouth, let alone sing. “I got up on stage and when it came time for me to scat, this sound just came out. It shocked me. I didn’t know where it was coming from. I realized it was me and I realized that the ancestors had arrived.”1 And the voice of those ancestors was yodeling. The kick of yodeling is discovering yodeling in strange situations. Surprise opens the gateway to paradigm shifts. Find yodeling on a Buzzcocks track or in Bollywood movies—no, really!—and force people to listen, and they still might not acknowledge the possibility. This is An Introduction to the Insane Logic of Yodeling Yodeling is maligned because people tend to fear, thus ridicule, the extreme, and tend to find the extreme lacking in nuance. . . . Many folks are more at ease lounging in pop cliché, deriving their subtlety from particular analogous memories. —Jack Collom, poet-yodeler-ornithologist-pedagogue is not just about damp-lederhosen-wearing, hip-flaskfull -of-Jägermeister-carrying, robust-bosomed-pig-tailedBavarian -mädchens, or huge-steins-of-beer-craving, cowloving herders yodeling about edelweiss and relationships they may or may not have had with their cows, sheep, or goats. And so, yodel studies are heresy, iconoclasm, an audio sabot thrown into the canon.2 Rockers grumble, classical musicians harrumph, new music aficionados twitch nervously—yodeling is just too kitschy, flakey, or déclass é. A more inclusive approach serves as an essential critical lever in the deconstruction of cultural assumptions because it upsets the status quo of those who carry presumption so far that it becomes the immutable truth, which helps preserve their own slender grips on status.3 I’m guided by certain principles inherent to yodeling itself: it’s unique and yet universal, marginal yet ubiquitous . To avoid exclusion one must be all-embracing, to avoid homogenization one must weigh similarities in a context of uniqueness. Musicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia writes: Ton de Leew attributed the universality of music to a number of factors including a possible archetypal source in the psychological make-up of the human being as a music maker and music user. Kolinski similarly observes that “the immense structural variety of musical styles represents a culturally derived diversification of psychophysiological universals,” while Wachsmann also suggests that the answer to the problem of universals in music is to be found in “the relationship between psyche (mind, mentality, soul) and sound” which “presents itself as () an amalgam of relationships between the physical properties of the sounds () the psychological response to the acoustic stimuli () the perception of sounds...