In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

We named our daughter Paloma Jet having no idea it would elicit so much . . . joy. Paloma is linked to two popular songs, “La Paloma” and “Paloma Blanca,” that many people can sing. So, merely pronouncing her name elicits nostalgic glee or “Paloma? That’s Spanish for dove, how nice.” On the other side, I once saw a Mohammed Nazi in the Paris phonebook. Not a pleasant name to precede you through life. Adolf hasn’t been a popular name since WWII, although I did run across Adolf Himmler and Adolf Butler on LinkedIn. A name either enhances or diminishes one’s fortunes. The same can be said for “yodel”; it elicits either grimaces or smiles. Yodeling has for centuries served as a pretech reconnaissance device but nowadays serves as more of a dogeared audio sample or sonic synecdoche;1 it represents certain states of mind or geography; it can actually project us into the Alps, onto the back of a palomino or into the swirling throes of an après-ski party, where people, freed of the confines of a constrictive workweek, let loose. The yodel is clearly connected to rites, rituals, and expressions of both exultation and lamentation, having both evoked and invoked various altered states of consciousness , enabling yodelers to go places or tell us what it was like. Peter Stanfield said it well: The yodel “gives voice to the ineffable.”2 This becomes clear listening to yodeling among the Sami, Pygmies, Appenzellers, and Leon Thomas, who once declared: “I call it Soularfone. The pygmies call it Umbo Weti. . . . This voice is not me, my voice is ancient. This person you see before you is controlled by ego but my voice is egoless.” Or as Randy Erwin observed: “I feel the vibrations of my voice from the bottoms of my feet to the top of my head.”3 From head to feet, heart to mind, mouth to ear, and beyond—Professor Alec Smart, a schoolhouse teacher, in  Georgia, performed “a yodel that climbs clear out through the roof and wanders among the stars”4 — there are universal links between song, chant, transcendence of the gray realities of our skin-confined lives, psychoactive substances, audio rhythms, the word, that first vibration, that spirit conveyor that sets everything Ego versus Echo When placed into a reverberant environment I can’t help but yodel; the overlapping textures and pitches blending together and echoing can be downright spiritual. —TR Kelley I yodeled madly, exultantly, with every possible break and variation, into the shimmering evening . . . From a distant peak there came a reply, soft and longdrawn -out and swelling gradually, a herdsman’s or hiker’s answer, and we listened quietly and happily to it. —Herman Hesse  into motion, implying a desire to subsume ego in a greater something—nature, purpose, belief. The yodel is wrapped up in a tangle of emotions: awe, joy, angst, which occurs at the confluence of nature and mankind, the boundary between inner and outer, between voice-breath and expanded consciousness. The precise location may vary but it often returns to somewhere between voice box and brain box. The voice as breath with sound attached to it (be it mantra, scat, or lyrics) can have a noticeable mind-altering effect. The voice-breath can metaphysically transport us from one state to another. It also has physical effects. The welling up in the chest, butterflies in the stomach, and sweaty palms may all be physical manifestations connected to what sound does to us. That yodeling sometimes gets you there or expresses the joy and awe of having just returned is not some totally outlandish “New Agey” claim. Yodeling in nature can be enjoyable or enthralling—the echo produced by yodeled vocables and pitched yelps banged into chords that are reflected back to the singer can be more effective than lyrics with too much logic attached to them. “Om,” “Selah,” and the Dadaist “rinse of nonsense” are related strategies. As Ed Sanders observed: “Yodeling . . . is a satisfying way to get ‘Gaia’ to echo back to the yodeler.”5 In Days Gone Bill Trout Pomeroy says that “yodeling defies categorization, let alone comprehension . Yodeling is what necessarily must happen when singing just won’t get the job done. You yodel when your emotions are so overloaded with impetus that they literally ‘cry out’ to the heavens, to the suburbs.”6 Hearing one’s own echo may have been an early...

Share