The Exquisite Art of Yodeling

     

 Allegany Mud Wrestling, a sport yet to be recognized as truly a great American past time; to the not so elegant sport Girl Mud Wrestling, where only professionals are allowed to struggle in the public pit for profit (say that three times while eating a hard boiled egg); to a phrase mostly endeared by me, but also used to differentiate quality, The exquisite art…

  My mine travels unconventional and unpredictable paths.  Isn’t it swell to live in a society that allows one to seek employment doing what they enjoy and have a perchance? Even if they might just reside on this side of the boundary where governmental efficiencies at executing it’s mandated purpose; which is of course, punishing violators of social norms and…such as they are, values, and outright clandestine illegal vice. 

  If my oldest sister were editing my post she’d mutter, “lot’s of words…lot’s and lot’s of words.”

  Alas, it matters little how one arrives at the juice topic for discussion, just that one throws oneself into the melee when it is found…no?

  Yodeling, (or jodeling) is a form of singing that involves singing an extended note which rapidly and repeatedly changes in pitch from the vocal of chest register (or “chest voice”) to the falsetto, (or head register), making a high-low-high-low sound.  The English word yodel is derived from a German word Jodeln, (originally Austro-Bavarian language) meaning “to utter the syllable jo” (pronounced “yo” in English). The technique is used in many cultures throughout the world. Most experts agree that yodeling was used by those living in the Central Alps as a method of communication between herders and their stock or between Alpine villages, with the multi-pitched “yelling” later becoming part of the region’s traditional lore and musical expression. 

  In Persian classical music, singers frequently use tahrir, a yodeling technique. Tahrir is prevalent in Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Turkish, Afghan, and Central Asian musical tradition, and to a lesser extent Pakistani and a few Indian musical traditions.  There are cases of yodeling taking the form of krimanchuili technique in Georgian traditional music and even in Central Africa, Pygmy singers use yodels within their elaborate polyphonic singing, while in Zimbabwe sometimes yodel with playing the mbira, (you may have seen these, small hand held wooden instruments with flat-nail like prongs that make a pleasant tone when struck by thumbs).

  The Mibuti of the Congo incorporate a distinctive whistles and yodels in their songs as well. The earliest record of a yodel is 1545, where it is described as ‘the call of a cowherd from Appenzell.  

  That got me to pondering what if that’s incorrect? What if, like with so many ancient cultures, the records and the customs of yodeling were lost in the usual way? Conquest often obliterated much of a culture’s traditional qualities that are now unknown by modern man.  Never mind wars of acquisition, writing materials of the past were primitive and renowned to get damage by weather as well as insects eating ancient manuscripts in storage.  Perhaps the Great Kings and Emperors of the past yodeled all of the time and we just don’t have any historic text reference to it? 

Perhaps it was so common that no one thought to mention it while composing, say, the Oddessy, because everyone knew how to yodel and had always been doing it, why mention something so mundane? Also is the fact that along with orange and purple, nothing rhymes with it. I’d be comparable to mentioning us uttering “excuse me” when we bump into other people.  Who knows, maybe this is unique to our time of existence, just as the fragment of the commonly-well-loved-practice of yodeling during the harvest festival was embraced by all cultures eons ago.

  Hey, maybe someone was yodeling late at night keeping their neighbors up, (again), and finally someone had to resort to it by screaming out their windows, “Excuse me, people are trying to sleep!”  It might just have been that instant when both the deaths kneel for yodeling occurred along with the birthing pains of the phrase excuse me?

Or, maybe not.