The Yodelling Choir

This is the story of a sound.

While travelling around Switzerland with a group of writers in 2016 I had an encounter with a sound as wonderful as any sight we saw in that spectacular country.

We were in the charming small town of Oberhofen, on the edge of Lake Thun (one of the two lakes that Interlaken sits between), and were walking back to our hotel after having dinner at the restaurant beside the castle.

The restaurant sits on the absolute lakefront, right beside the pretty bridge and turret that extend the castle over the water. At sunset the stonework is bathed in golden light, while tiny figures of paddleboarders and swimmers dot the burnished surface of the lake. To get back to our hotel we had to cross the playground of the local primary school. Night had fallen and the old-fashioned school building stood in darkness, except for one lighted second-floor window. And then we heard the most extraordinary sound.

It was the sound of stately and melodious singing, unlike any I’d ever heard before. The melody unfolded at a slow tempo, supported by solemn, resonant harmonies. These were human voices, but I couldn’t place them as emanating from man, woman or child. We stopped in our tracks. What could be producing this heavenly sound?

We were practically holding our breaths, awed by the majesty of the singing, when the many parts of the harmony started to fill out a vaguely familiar musical shape – something that felt like hillsides and cowbells. At the same moment, two of us exclaimed in astonishment, ‘They’re yodelling!’

Yodelling – a style of singing which alternates between the head and the chest voice – is practised in many cultures around the world from Africa to North America. I’m afraid I’ve always thought of it as more or less comic. It tends to be performed by people wearing kitsch costumes, whether dirndls and lederhosen or rhinestones and cowboy hats. You can make any song funny by doing a yodelling version of it, and you can make pretty much anyone laugh by throwing a few yodels into a comedy scene skit.

The seven dwarfs yodel when they sing their ‘Silly Song’ in Snow White, and the sound of yodelling punctuates Goofy’s mishaps in The Art of Skiingand other classic Disney animations. It’s sweet and funny when Fräulein Maria and the Von Trapp children yodel ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ in the Sound of Music, all self-conscious Alpine stereotypes. It’s gross and funny when a yodelling song makes the heads of the alien invaders explode in Mars Attacks, thereby saving the world.

Yet there was nothing remotely comic or kitsch about the singing that floated over the darkened schoolyard in Oberhofen. It had charm, it had grace, and more than anything it had dignity.

My friend Tamara went off to find a vantage point from which she could see into the upper-storey window. She reported back that the singers were all adult males and that they seemed to be having a choir practice. What kind of idyllic community is this, where the children play and learn by day within sight of the castle and the lake, and the adults gather by night to celebrate and sustain their folk heritage? And even if we don’t invest the moment with so much meaning, how interesting it is just to discover how people in different places choose to spend their free time, and what things please and matter to them! I didn’t need to see the singers to be intrigued and delighted by their practice. For me, this was an experience of pure sound.

I feel that in our hierarchy of travel-sense, sound has the middle position. Of course, sight comes first, dominating everything. Then, in our food-obsessed culture, comes taste – people talk about tasting their way around a country – although in the age of Instagram it often feels as if the look of food is becoming more important to travellers than its flavour. And then, just ahead of smell and touch, but not by much, comes sound.

Yet music, voices, calls of birds and animals, the noises of wind and sea and even traffic, can epitomize a travel experience, sometimes better than any picture or view can do. I have a small archive of treasured sound souvenirs from the past couple of years. Cowbells and the rustling of grass in an Austrian mountain meadow. The roar of the Rio Grande hurtling through a deep gorge in New Mexico. Sweet-sad accordion music in a Sicilian street. The liquid call of whip-birds in a sub-tropical Australian rainforest.

I don’t imagine that ‘sound-hearing’ will overtake ‘sight-seeing’ any time soon as our primary travel activity, but here’s a plea for paying more attention to the soundscape when we travel, and maybe even recording some of it. Thank goodness on the evening we heard the yodelling choir, once I’d got past my initial amazement I had the wit to find my phone and turn the voice recorder on. So now I have, preserved forever, an aural memento of that night.

There’s about sixty seconds of it. The music is just as sweet as I remember, the choral sound swelling and subsiding with the movement of the song. And, unintentionally, I’ve captured other voices as well – our own low whisperings as wonder what it is we are listening to. There’s Kees’s deep voice, speaking Dutch-accented English. Diana and Tamara are conferring in German. Then comes the moment, when the music shifts in tone from its initial unearthly majesty to something more folkloric. Exclamations as we realize that it’s a yodelling choir. Soft laughter, not at the singers but with the delight of discovery. And then, at the end, my own heartfelt sigh of pleasure, inadvertently recorded alongside the music that prompted it.

On your travels, have you had a ‘sound-hearing’ experience that was as memorable as your ‘sight-seeing’?