Echoes of Home

There is no sound, apart perhaps from the distinctive chimes of the cuckoo clock, that evokes Switzerland quite like a yodel – the ululating reverberation of the human voice against Alpine nature that brings the hills alive with the sound of music. Yet for those who dismiss the yodel as an obsolete and ossified cultural form, along comes Stefan Schwietert’s Echoes Of Home to show the new life being breathed into this ancient brand of singing.

Instead of presenting a stuffy musicological history, Schwietert follows three different singers who, in their different ways, adapt the yodelling tradition to express their own sense of individual identity. As a child, Christian Zehnder used to believe that yodelling was “just awful”, but now sees it as a non-verbal way to communicate who he is and where he comes from – even if he likes mixing it up with jazz intonations and Tuvan throat singing to create a hybrid idiolect that resonates with his own personality.

Born in the US to Swiss parents, Ericka Stucky incorporates yodelling, along with all manner of other cultural influences, into her bilingual, multimedia performance art, in part as an attempt to reconcile the exuberant American and conservative Swiss that she claims are at constant war within her.

Noldi Alder was born in Appenzellerland, the rural heartland of yodelling, to a multi-generational family of renowned singers, but if he, with his haunting ‘Zäuerli’ (or slow plaints), comes closest of the three singers to the essence of yodelling, his breaches with tradition have still created palpable frictions with his father.

By letting these musical innovators speak (and sing) for themselves, and by filming them in both mountainscapes and more modern performance spaces, Schwietert shows a nation that is, for all its historical roots, multi-faceted and ever-changing, so that something as primal as a yodel can also be truly modern. Their performances are intercut with file footage, home videos and family photos, creating a mannered film language that, like the music it documents, links the present to the past in a series of echoes.

The only fault here is budgetary. Just as the Swiss mountains require a big, echoing voice to fill them, they also demand a wide lens to capture their scale – but the digital equipment used here is simply no match for these landscapes, all but ruining several potentially sublime scenes with artifacting and distortion.

Anton Bitel

Anticipation:

A yodelling triptych? Talk about niche.

Enjoyment:

Sounds great, but deserves to look better.

In Retrospect:

Universal truths about identity are successfully located in the parochial.