Originally, this blog concerned palindromes, those playful phrases which read the same forward and backward. I labored for minutes bringing to mind palindromes from my past: Lager sir is regal, In it ram a martini, and others. The title was to be Yo Banana Boy. I would end this wealth of word play with a Riders in the Sky video, The Ballad of Palindrome.Off the the Interweb I went. The first video found was How the Yodel Was Born. My razor sharp mind dervishly whirled in a new direction. Some would attribute this to Attention Deficit Disorder, others to my innate laziness. I pay no heed to those detractors as yodels echo through my empty cranium. Mmm, yodels, those delicious chocolate-covered tasty treats..oops, there I go again.
Yodeling - the melodic modulating of the voice between the chest register and the falsetto. The sound brings to mind majestic peaks, Swiss milkmaids and secret numbered bank accounts. Musicologists trace the yodel not to Alpine meadows, but to Africa and the dawning of animal domestication. Pygmies (a somewhat pejorative term for a myriad of tribes including the Aka, Efe & Mbuti) have yodeled for millennia. Today, it is still part of their culture.
How did yodelling migrate from the African continent to the Alps. Perhaps its embedded deep in our musical memory like Jung's collective unconscious. I prefer to imagine Pygmies sharing their polyphonic performance during a mountain-climbing excursion to Switzerland. - as ever BB
"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery." - Charles Baudelaire
Click below for the Riders in the Sky music video:
No comments:
Post a Comment