Yodel in East Asia
Until now, World Yodel Day have been introduced the yodelings that can be heard in popular music around the world. And so far, we introduced yodeling, which can be heard in popular music in East Asia.
Naturally, the yodels we have introduced so far cannot be said to be all the yodels that can be heard in popular music in East Asia, but it can be said that the first stage of yodeling, which can be heard in popular music around the world, has just ended. Perhaps for most Westerners who are reading this, East Asia is the home of the so-called dark-haired, yellow-skinned very similar-looking people.
But in fact, here in East Asia, it’s too diverse and different people live to fall into one category. Countries representing East Asia, such as Korea, China, Japan, and Mongolia, use completely different scripts. In other words, Westerners who use the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet can read each other’s languages without knowing the meaning, but East Asian countries cannot read different languages without studying the letters of different countries. In the case of Chinese, which is spoken by most people in the region, it is not a dialect level, but consists of a number of different languages that are difficult to communicate with each other. In addition, Korean, Japanese, and Mongolian are languages of a completely different system, even in different order of words compared to Chinese.
We have gathered these various East Asian yodelings into one video. What we are paying attention to now is their homogeneity. They are all different, but they all sing the same yodeling.
Let’s listen to the yodelings of East Asians. Their harmony with the same yodel is considered as another example that proves that the yodel is truly an international language!
#요들 #ヨーデル #约德尔 #約德爾 #ёодол #Yodel #Jodel #йодль #يودل #Jodłować #יודל #Jódlovat #yodeling #โยเดล #Korea #Japan #China #HongKong #Mongol #Taiwan #Singapore #Malaysia #Indonesia
Yodel, which can be found in popular music around the world
The fourth and final theme of ”The Indoor Yodeling Video Series”, which is continuing due to the CVD situation, is “Yodel, which can be found in popular music around the world”.
Until now, “The Indoor Yodeling Video Series” has made and proceeded all the videos in advance, but this time, the contents are so vast that we are still making separate videos, and new regrets continue to occur in the meantime.
I start with an honest confession that the plan to look through all the music with yodels from around the world is likely to lead to very reckless results.
There are many reasons, but first, there are really too many yodels in the world, and the more I dig for forgotten or hidden yodels, the more too many and new yodels are constantly coming out. Secondly, there were many lyrics that implied expressions that were too difficult to handle translation with my poor English skills. So, as a result, it seems that this time also annoyed many of my global yodel friends. It was a task that couldn’t be challenged without their help. I would like to express my appreciation and sorry to the Yodelers around the world for their hard work.
As I confessed earlier, it seems that I can only introduce yodels that are less than a handful to scan the whole world, and even though I wanted to introduce, there were quite a few songs that I couldn’t do due to my language limitations. I don’t think I can guarantee at this time whether such songs can be introduced later or not.
In addition, all the songs introduced are basically uploaded with permission through direct contact with the musicians and related parties, and songs that were not contacted or had already passed away and could not find a way to contact them were conducted in accordance with the YouTube copyright policy.
As mentioned at the beginning, the theme of the series is ‘Yodels found in popular music around the world’. Since it is aimed at the general public who is interested in yodels at least a little more than the established yodelers, the two major &traditional genres of yodels : ‘Alpine ‘ and ‘Western’, are not mentioned in this series. Maybe it’s a vain greedy, but I want to show many people how much yodel is distributed around the world.
In fact, as I proceeded in this way, the tendency of the standards to be jagged in various ways seems to gradually increase, and it has caused quite a lot of confusion by myself. When everything is done, I’m just trying to feel a little more comfortable that I’ll be able to give new insights into a clearer standard.
This series starts in Korea. In other words, starting with the appearance of the yodel in Asian popular music, it will move to the Americas and finally end in Europe.
Meanwhile, the region deliberately turned away from this series is Africa. The decisive reason is that I cannot decipher the African language at all, and I still lack the overall level of knowledge to see African yodelings. Talking about the local yodel will be the next task, but I feel choked at the idea that it is too large to assure whether it can be handled.
In addition, it could hardly handle the yodels of Latin America. It is also the reason similar to the previous region, but my personal research itself is too small to compare with the previous region, so it is a frank confession that the correlation between popular music with yodels in Latin America is unknown at this time.
However, I cannot say that I introduced all the yodels from popular music in Asia, North America and Europe. There may be countries that are introduced more intensively, but there are others that were intentionally ignored, and others that were not introduced because I don’t know about it.
In summary, the global distribution of yodels is so wide and deep. It seems like many yodels are shining like stars in the night sky. There are certainly many yodels that sparkle so brightly, but because of the limitations of our vision or because they are too far away.
In the end, I will introduce only the yodel that glitters in front of my eyes, but this series seems to be going on quite a long time. It seems that it will take at least 6 to 9 months for the series to be completed, and maybe until World Yodel Day next year. Even as I am writing this article, I am very questioned whether this reckless yodeling series, which continues to cause confusion in the concept arrangement, will end well, but nevertheless, I will boldly raise the anchor!
In principle, what I want to say through this series is to think once more about what similarities and differences exist between the world we dream of and the real world.
Each individual is a descendant of someone and belongs to a country or people, and at the same time, they are all one and the same human and citizen of the world.
Why do I like yodels? Why does someone else in another world like my favorite yodel as like me?
World Yodel Day tries to create a time to think once more about the commonalities and differences of all of us in the common human language called Yodel. If you are also interested, let’s explore together!
Now, We are finishing the official 2020 World Yodel Day online event.
Now, We are finishing the official 2020 World Yodel Day online event.
This event tried to express the word ‘World Yodel Day’ in languages around the world, and as a result, ‘World Yodel Day’ was expressed in a total of 30 languages (including dialects).
Even this year, various yodelers from around the world carefully created and sent their various appearances to suit the theme, and it took about 8 months to collect and produce this unique video.
The video I linked right now is a look at it all in one. If you yodel-lover, it’s a little long, 24 minutes, but it’s a good idea to take some time to watch it.
As anyone who has watched, I don’t think it will be easy to appreciate because the overall atmosphere is somewhat documentary[?] rather than popular. Even those who have enjoyed and studied yodel for a long time will be able to hear ‘strange sounds’ that are both foreign and even desolate from diverse ethnic groups, which are both very exotic and rejected. 
😦
‘World Yodel Day’ claims the so-called ‘pseudo yodel vocalization’ that such various peoples sing as a yodel vocalization.
In that sense, I consistently insist that the essence of yodel is ‘exotic (and at the same time) heterogeneous’. In addition, I will try to bring out the meaning of yodeling study in it.
What is familiar to me may be unfamiliar to others, and it will come as a somewhat romantic feeling of ‘exotic’ when viewed positively, but it will be accepted as a different idea, that is, ‘heterogeneous’ and ‘Taboo’ when viewed negatively, and of course the other person’s case It could be.
In fact, it is quite natural that people who are in a relationship with similar things such as blood ties or delays form an identity that is us and distinguish us from others. However, even though it is completely illogical to look at other people’s traditions and norms differently or regard them as sin just because they are different from me, such things have been repeated countless times in the history of mankind, and I think they are still repeating here and there.
In that sense, I want to give the meaning that studying yodeling is one of the ways to learn one of the good ways to understand foreign/different people. With the same logic, ‘World Yodel Day’ does not claim only one yodel, but acknowledges the existence of various yodels and seeks to coexist with the various yodels.
To that extent, once again, if you watch videos of various ethnic groups and countries celebrating ‘World Yodel Day’, I think you will be able to enjoy various other views.
The whole video was made with that purpose. How convincingly it was reflected is a little questionable even for me, but I think it was a bit lacking. And I think it is entirely due to my lack of competence ^^;
The Western World Tour
Western music is most often acoustic in its core instrumentation. Its lyrics are typically about the lives, loves, lore, locales, legends and legacy of the old and new West, its people or Cowboying worldwide.
Tips? Comments? Ideas for the column, send to : Rick Huff, P.O. Box 8442, Albuquerque, NM 87198-8442 or bestofthewest@swcp.com
So what’s up in our wacky world? Well, let’s see. All the usual, of course. Conflict and disharmony, conspiracy theories and covert activities, suspicion and mistrust abounding. And then there’s yodeling. Worldwide!!!
In fact, as many of us learned for the first time through its founder’s attendance at IWMA 2019 in Albuquerque, there actually is a World Yodel Day! Each August 8소, thousands and thousands of people around the globe stop all those other fun activities they’re into…and yodel. The day has gained sufficient strength that a commemorative postage stamp was able to be issued in its nation of origin. That nation is South Korea!!!
Since 2013, World Yodel Day’s fervently dedicated founder and Yodeler-In-Chief Peter Lim Has literally traveled the world to promote the event…posting videos and photos as he goes and handing out buttons bearing the venture’s distinctive interlocking 8s.
Why 8?? “The 8 is the shape of the yodel.” Lim will tell you, grinning. “In and around and back again!!” Laid on its side, the 8 also conveniently becomes the infinity symbol…a detail also not lost on Peter Lim. As far as he is concerned, the yodel’s possibilities are infinite… and never has there been a more unique and focused ambassador for the epiglottal arts!!
Following his November visit to Albuquerque, Lim turned up in the Fort Worth, Texas Stockyards…and back online.
“We had fun testing Peter’s theory that yodeling is a universal language,” writes Jeff Prince, host of the Toast & Jam webcast.
At Peter’s request, Prince had come up with “The World Yodel,” a song to go with the existing “World Yodel Day Song,” written in 2015 by the Korean artist known as “Excellent Soo!” Prince and Lim were set to premiere the new song live on the webcast when yodelay-ee-who should spontaneously appear but Devon Dawson! (Cast a yodel into the air and ya never can tell!) Miss Devon conjured up a standing bass for Prince and joined the jam herself. View the results on YouTube. Well you know how the Internet can be. Subsequent online versions of that one appear, translated into various languages, as had happened with the earlier song…and it’s off and running.
For his World Yodel Day in 2019, Peter encouraged increased participation from the yodel-bedazzled populations of Southeast Asia. And on August 8th, 2019, there erupted the biggest WYD online event yet, spanning time zones and languages “barriers.” And, ever the proper host, Peter made sure that everyone was notified when the final molecule of August 8th’s light had flickered out in the last Earth time zone, calling the event to an official close! I’m serious! You have to google this stuff! You won’t believe your eyes and ears!
When Peter journeyed the amazing 6800 miles from his home to join the IWMA in its November celebrations, we were treated not only to his own yodeling skills in competitions, but also a “handheld tour” of World Yodel Day thanks to his ever-ready Smartphone. Posted examples include citizens of every continent save the penguins, all smiling and yodeling away and sending their loving greetings! Also on Lim’s site we found such wonders as “You Are My Sunshine” done with voice, alpenhorn, pan flute, guitar, mandolin and bass, “I Want To Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart” and “Lovesick Blues” as sung in Slavic by Sofia Shkidchenco and “Back In The Saddle Again” performed in Korean by Lee Jea-dong(vocal/guitar), Kim Woo-jin(bass), Kim Eun-jeong(accordion) and Lee Chang-dae(drums)! There’s much, much more.
In preparation for the coming WYD in 2020, Peter Lim has launched a bold, new initiative. In short, participants will start a yodel song with one verse, perform it, pass it on for the next verse to be added or start a new song, pass it on…and one…and on…
By August 9th, 2020, the world just might find itself the proud (if befuddled) recipient of hundreds of yodel songs sung in umpteen different languages!! It will all finally be coordinated through videos send to peter@yodeler.net!!
So what, you may well ask, is ultimately accomplished by something called “World Yodel Day??” Oh, how ‘bout one more proof being officially registered that there exists an international language…or two?
And perhaps there really may be some justification for a column bearing the name “Western World Tour?” And maybe that, like love itself, the yodel needs no translation?
Or maybe even…for those who read between the lines… with the right ambassadors saddled up, the same kind of awareness can be made to happen for “Western??!!”
2019 Yodel Letter was published in “Western Way”
“Western Way” is the journal of the International Western Music Association (IWMA) and IWMA is the organization that develops and preserves yodel as part of their traditional cowboy culture.
Gloriously, the Yodel Letter, an annual event that has been taking place around the world since 2013, has been featured in the Western Way.The protagonist of the letter is Bjorn Tomren, Norwegian yodeler.
The Yodel Story, which he sent to the world through the Yodel Letter last year, is now available online, a year later.
On a trail in Tirol, bound for St. Anton, Autria, I’m trying to recall my first encounter with yodeling. It must have been “The Silly Song,’ a fantastic musical piece from the 1937 Walt Disney movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. For some reason they air this small clip on the Norwegian state-run television before every Christmas Eve, and it’s a truly impressive symbiosis of cartoons and music. The seven dwarfs are putting on a great show for Snow White. They’re dancing, yodeling and playing different kinds of instruments with great virtuosity, while she is dancing around, laughing, clapping and sometimes joining in with her beautiful soprano voice. For a kid growing up in Norway in the 1980s, no Christmas holiday was complete without it.
Skipping ahead ten years or so, my main interest in life had gotten to be music and, in particular, Anglo-American music ranging from rock, grunge, blues, soul, folk, jazz, country, punk and so on. I had even picked up a guitar and learned a couple of tunes by the likes of Neil Young, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. My friends and I were constantly trying to dig deeper into the history of American music and soon we were familiar with artists such as Woody Guthrie, Rambling Jack Elliott, Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. I was especially captivated by the voices of Rodgers and Williams and their soulful longing blues yodels. Jimmie Rodgers, by many regarded as the father of American country music, even had Louis Armstrong with him on some of the tracks and exclaimed that he’s learned both the blues and the yodel from the African-American population. There’s a lot of warmth and humanity in Rodgers’ songs, and his tales of hardship combined by his haunting sad train whistle yodels move me to this day.
“Long Gone Lonesome Blues” by Hank Williams was the first yodel song I ever learned. It’s a story about a guy who’s down on his luck and when his girl leaves him, he decides to drown himself, but when he gets to the river, the river is dry. Hank slides neatly in and out of falsetto while singing: “She’s long gone, and now I’m lonesome blue.” My parents were less than impressed by my attempts but slowly and gradually I started to improve. Now, 20 years later, I must have performed it thousands of times in front of audiences, and I’m still not tired of it. I grew up by a small fjord, a village on the west coast of Norway called Tomrefjord. It’s a branch of the ninth longest fjord in Norway named Romsdalsfjord. A picturesque and alpine valley, Romsdal, at the innermost part of the fjord, lends its name to the whole region. One day on a ferry crossing Romsdalsfjord, a song came on the radio that immediately made me laugh. It was a boy yodeling his heart out and singing “Je ger fra Romsdalen Norges Tirol” (I’m from Romsdal, the Tirol of Norway). Apart from being quite amused, I was surprised that there existed a Norwe-gian yodeling song. In Europe, as in most other places, we associate this technique with the countries connected to the Alps, but here was a yodel straight from my back yard, so to speak. I felt an urge to investigate this strange affair and soon discovered that yodeling was quite popular in Norway and in the whole of Scandinavia throughout the 1930s and 40s. Not only that, the kid on the record, Odd Pedersen, had recorded several yodeling songs in 1942 and had lived just 10 kilometers away from my home in Tomrefjord. I decided I should try to get in touch with him and enquire about his yodeling heydays. He could still be making music for all that I knew, but there was also a chance he had passed away. This was in the early 2000s and if he was still alive and kicking, I reckoned he’d be in his 70s.
Odd Pedersen is a fairly common name in Norway, and it took me some time two track him down. He is now residing in the same town as I was studying in, Bergen, the second largest city in Norway. I called him up and we talked for quite a while. His innocent childhood alto voice I had gotten to know from old recordings had now turned hoarse and croaky. With a raspy drone, he told me that he and his family had escaped from Bergen up to Romsdal during the Second World War. It was there in Vestnes, my neighboring village, he learned to yodel. In 1942 he got the chance to perform in front of Norway’s answer to Bing Crosby, Jens Book Jensen, who got so impressed with the boy that he brought him to Oslo for a recording session. Odd Pedersen enjoyed some years of fame in Norway before his voice changed due to puberty. When the peace came in 1945, he and his family moved back to Bergen. In his teens, Pedersen went to sea and remained a sailor for most of his working life.
For Pedersen, yodeling was a thing of the past; therefore, my interest in him and his music took him by surprise. Truth be told, a story of an unusual life far exceeds my interest in yodeling. In fact, I’m probably not the biggest yodeling fan you’ll ever meet, but the genre has by strange twists and turns made a lasting impact on my life. Let me explain.
My childhood friend Hallvar Djupvik and I were quite into comedy acts and stand-up in our student days. In particular, there was an American comic called Andy Kaufman superbly portrayed by Jim Carey in the movie Man on the Moon. Kaufman had a knack for the absurd and had a gift for making the audience question what was real and what was not, what was an attempt at comedy and what was dead serious. Hallvar and I discovered that we got the same feeling when watching some of the Bavarian volksmusik (folk music) acts we found on YouTube: Wildecker Herzbuben, Franzl Lang, Florian Zilbereisen and so on. Were they joking or were they sincere? With this in mind, and after a couple of drinks, we figured we should start our own polka and yodeling band and try our best to make people believe we were deeply passionate about the music. One could say it was an attempt at making a deluding comical avant-garde trickster our project. In 2007, we hooked up with the accordionist Heine Bugge and went to a yodeling festival in Switzerland. It was not what we had expected. Instead of funny and silly looking yodelers, we found yodel choirs that captivated us with their genuine, beautiful and meditative songs. (I later learned that yodeling, the switch between chest voice and falsetto, can be found all over the world. In Norway, we have old traditional cattle calls using this technique, but we also have something called Laling which can sound very similar to the Alpine yodeling and functioned as a form of communication between the shepherdess and shepherds in the older days.)
We abandoned the art project, drank up our money and turned street musicians to get home. Heine played the accordion, Hallvar sang opera, while I made some attempts at yodeling “Mein Vater ist ein Appenzeller.” Back in Norway, someone had heard about our little odyssey and to our surprise wanted to book us for a concert. I was even more baffled when I realized we would get money for it. We rehearsed a couple of yodel hits, called ourselves Polkabjørn & Kleine Heine, and did the job. Not long after that we got booked to another job and then another. It escalated quickly. Soon we were the opening act for A-ha’s farewell tour in Norway. We even had a concert in honor of Odd Pedersen in Bergen who attended with his daughter. In 2009, we got a manager and all of a sudden we started performing on TV and having concerts all over the world. Now, 10 years later, and I’m on a train in Austria with Heine, bound for another gig.
It has been a fun, strange and, at times, absurd journey and I’ve come to realize that yodeling has this life affirming quality: it makes people smile. And to quote Gershwin “Who could ask for anything more?”
With that, I salute all of you yodelers around the world and especially Peter Lim and World Yodel Day for keeping the spirit alive. Skål!
All the best and with kind regards,
Bjørn Tomren
About Bjorn:
Bjørn Tomren is a Norwegian musician, singer, composer and adventurer, known for his great vocal range and his vide variety of vocal techniques such as yodelling, overtone singing, throat singing and Norwegian folk singing (kveding). For the past decade he has worked as a musician, performing around the globe either by himself or as one half of the Andy Kaufmane-sqe comical duo, Polkabjørn & Kleine Heine. The duo rose to fame in their home country through the documentary The Art of Yodelling (2012), which moved them from being A-ha’s opening act back in 2010, to them traveling and performing around the world, exploring the phenomena of yodelling. The last couple of years Tomren has turned his attention to song writing and his debut album, along with girlfriend Åse Britt Reme Jakobsen, is due to be released in September 2019 on Propeller Records.
To learn more about World Yodel Day, check out their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/yodelday) or visit with Peter Lim who is scheduled to attend IWMA2019 and participate in the IWMA Yodeling Contest.
P.S : In addition, in 2020, a new yodeler story is being sent. If you are interested, please contact peter@yodeler.net.
https://yodelday.wordpress.com/2020/02/02/2020-yodel-stamps-were-released/
We will decide to postpone the 2020 World Yodel Day Festival in Vietnam
On April 10-13, 2020. World Yodel Day will be going to have a yodel concert at Vietnam to spread yodel to Southeast Asia.
This collaborative event, which had never been attempted by any yodeler or yodel group in the world, was based on the extraordinary interest and encouragement of many yodelers around the world, but the outbreak of the epidemic of corona 19, which began in China in late January, Everything is wrong. In the end, I think we have no choice but to postpone the event. That’s why the 2020 Vietnam World Yodel Day Festival will be tentatively postponed.
It is not a cancellation but a postponement because the hearts of many people who have contributed and encouraged this event are not a cancellation but a postponement. As time goes by and the good times come back, we will begin this event again with joy.
At the planning stage, the contents of the event were attempted to be shared based on the worldwide sharing online. Therefore, the local performances in Vietnam were postponed, but there were 4 videos in which the proceedings and the preliminary videos were promoted.
At this point, we wonderedwhether or not it would be good to release the video, but in the end, wedecided to release it over a total of three weeks. We did not cancel the event, but delay it.
This video contains congratulations and encouragements from yodelers around the world to spread the yodel in Southeast Asia. We talk about the impossible dream of spreading yodel to Southeast Asia. By the way. We all believe that many people’s dreams come true. Let’s do it together!
2020 Yodel stamps were released
2020 Yodel Stamps were released at 2 February , Head Voice Day
Yodel Stamp is an annual online event since 2013 for Yodel-lovers around the world officially on World Yodel Day.
The Yodel Stamps have been a powerful testimony to the fact that this small music we all love is being widely sang in a much larger number of countries than we thought.
The model of the Yodel stamp of the year is Fracelle Maria Doiron, French- Canadian yodeler.
If you are curious about the story of Francelle’s yodel, sign up for the Yodel Letter. You’ll receive a letter from Francelle’s with the Yodel Stamp she designed.
Yodel Letter charges $ 3 per piece. Yodel Letter is also part of World Yodel Day’s efforts to maintain and develop a small piece of music called Yodel that is disappearing around the world.
We look forward to your participation.
peter@yodeler.net
http://www.youtube.com/yodelday
yodelday 