Yodelling is trendy: even in the big cities, this alpine singing form is now becoming increasingly popular. How this came about and how yodelling has been instrumentalized over the course of its history have now been traced by Innsbruck researchers. They also reveal the political and cultural influences on the “yodelling trends”.
Yodelling or bagpipe is commonly understood as a song in which meaningless syllables are strung together in mostly erratic melody sequences. It is also typical that the yodel singers often switch to the falsetto or head voice in order to master the abrupt jumps in the high registers. In Europe, yodelling has its origins in the eastern Alpine region, where it was documented as early as the 17th and 18th centuries. However, yodelling experienced a real boom at the beginning of the 19th century when well-known singers from the Alpine region brought this form of singing to European cities and triggered a real yodel fashion. Yodelling became internationally known and popular, especially through Tyrolean singer groups, and found its way into country music or jazz, among other things.
Identity-creating and connecting
A team of researchers led by the music ethnologist Raymond Ammann from the University of Innsbruck has now investigated how yodelling developed in the Alpine region and what purpose it served. Her studies trace for the first time the eventful history of yodelling and the yodel song from the Alps of the 19th century to its recent popularization in contemporary urban space. In addition, the results show that the historical developments of yodeling in Switzerland and Tyrol differ.
The research shows, among other things, that yodeling in Tyrol primarily performed an identity-creating function during the Napoleonic Wars. It served as an acoustic symbol for the rebellion against the French and Bavarian troops, as Ammann and his team report. In the 19th century, after Tyrolean singing groups had made yodelling internationally known and popular, the Tyrolean song with a yodel part also became popular in Switzerland. At the beginning of the 19th century, folk music festivals such as the Unspunnenfests in Interlaken near Bern were even held there, to celebrate their own folk traditions and to unite the urban and rural population.
Yodeling as a political statement
In the first half of the 20th century, yodelling became increasingly politically exploited, as the researchers report. In Austria, singing and yodelling during National Socialism was considered a patriotic conscience and an expression of the “Aryan” culture. The regime therefore supported the yodel song in various ways. In Switzerland, on the other hand, attempts were made at this time to clearly differentiate from the National Socialist neighbors in yodelling. In 1943, for example, the first written instructions for Swiss yodeling appeared, which were to give it its own distinction from the German-Austrian form. This own yodelling variant, funded by the Federal Yodelling Association, was intended to reinforce national identity and underline the distance to the National Socialist states, as Ammann and his team explain.
After the Second World War, however, yodeling became increasingly unpopular. In the 1960s and 1970s, this form of singing – especially among city dwellers – was considered reactionary and inappropriate “musical patriotism”.
The new renaissance of yodelling
Interestingly, this has changed significantly in recent years. Even more: yodelling has never been as popular as it is today. Yodelling, paddling and juchezen have long since found their way into the modern lifestyle of the urban middle class and are combined with hiking and also with yoga, Qi Gong or Pilates without any fear of contact, and used as a therapeutic agent according to the motto “Jodel dich frei”. “Yodelling is now a unifying element and no longer serves to delimit,” confirms Ammann. Instead, people now see yodelling as a way to gain new personal, musical experiences – both alone and in a group.
But how did this change and new yodeling boom come about? Ammann and his team attribute this to two developments in recent music history. On the one hand, the wave of world music meant that people became more open to popular music from foreign regions. This in turn aroused interest in musical “exoticisms” from their own environment and culture. On the other hand, the increasing popularity of modern forms of folk music encouraged interest and made yodelling “socially acceptable”: “New folk music emerged from the Austropop, with initially satirical content,” explains Ammann. With this, yodeling also experienced its renaissance.
The results of the project that has just been completed can be read, among other things, in the book “Tirolerei in Switzerland”, which will be published by Wagner University Publishing House in spring 2020.
Source: FWF The Science Fund