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

Notes

Preface: Drive-By Yodel 1. Gertrude and Gresna Felts to the author, January , . 2. Tom Zeller Jr., “The Most Horrible Sound in the World,” The Lede (blog), New York Times, January , : http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com//// most-disgusting-sound-in-the-world/. The sound of vomiting , according to researcher Trevor Cox of Britain’s Salford University, is the single most horrible sound, as corroborated by over a million online responses to a questionnaire. “We are pre-programmed to be repulsed by horrible things such as vomiting, as it is fundamental to staying alive to avoid nasty stuff,” said Cox. The nature-nurture issue is interesting but remains unresolved. Some believe the disgust of feces, rotting meat, et cetera, involves our evolutionary effort to ensure survival. Bryn Mawr psychology professor Clark McCauley believes that what most people find disgusting is less evolutionary than learned: “This biological mechanism was taken up and extended to produce a much broader mechanism of revulsion at different cultural horizons” (quoted in Zeller). In this context, yodel revulsion mechanisms are culturally determined, learned behavior. The Jersey yodel is American slang for vomiting. 3. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_loop Phonological_loop. 5. I was born into an amusical family. My father sang along with the radio, atrociously but entertainingly. My mother claimed she’d once been very musical, even singing in a choir, but something happened during WWII—a bomb went off near her bedroom window?—that forever ruined music for her; she seemed almost harassed by music. My early musical influences included music meted out as punishment at school and being forced to play a flutophone. An Introduction to the Insane Logic of Yodeling 1. Quoted in Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo, Damian Lazarus interview with Thomas, Straight No Chaser  (Autumn ). 2. Yodeling as refreshing anomaly removes us from our boring routines, the standard belief system upon which we hang our coats. Regardless of how often you’ve been exposed to it, it never fails to pique emotion—something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is . . . 3. I side with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that the elite enhance their control over the unempowered by manipulating various culturally embedded practices—rituals, festivals , traditions, and symbols—to make their legitimacy seem part of the natural order of things. They stimulate a sense of collectivity (clan, nationalism, patriotism); they inflict institutions, nostalgia, collective identities, and annual events upon the masses to maintain authority so that hegemony and solidarity are muddled to “assure the reproduction of the relations of domination and control.” Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; cited in Sam Wong, “Partner or Pariah? Building Social Capital with Clan Associations,” .../issco/documents/WongSampaper.doc. Dominance requires the successful manipulation of, among other things, language distinctions, (traditional folk) music, and other cultural expressions that are “institutionalized instruments for [the] maintenance of the symbolic order” (). 4. J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Ethnomusicology and African Music (Accra, Ghana: Afram, ), . Notes  5. Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ). 6. Nketia, Ethnomusicology and African Music, , –. 7. Territory, according to radical French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially in their book Anti-Oedipus, essentially signifies distance and separation, distinction and ism. Territory carves us up into spatiotemporal distinctions of us and them, mind and body, West and East, human and divine, here and there. They followed the theories of prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan, who believed territorial distinctions separated us from the universal rhythms of the stars, seasons, and body, which superimposed, as Leroi-Gourhan notes, “the dynamic image of rhythm created and fashioned by human gestures and vocal emissions and . . . the graphic records inscribed by hand.” Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . He observed that, as soon as a sound, for instance, becomes an accepted expression, new territory is mapped out. 8. Paul Hazell, an otherwise invaluable yodel resource, in a March  post at Mudcat Café, noted: “Yodelling originated in the Alpine regions of Europe—not just Switzerland.” 9. It’s theorized that its sonic thrust derives precisely from that instant of silence, that vacuum of no sound as the voice switches from one’s low to high or vice versa. Think of this instant at the glottal stop—oft punctuated by a consonantal sound (a d or k) as in uh-oh—not as silence, antisound, or as a glitch, but as the yodel’s propellant...