Dr Schacher Seppli - Ruedi Rymann
Rudolf Rymann, yodler, sportsman and farmer: born in Sarnen, Switzerland 31 January 1933; married (one son, five daughters); died in Giswil, Switzerland 10 September 2008. If you put aside the Toblerone and cuckoo-clock clichés, you would be hard pressed to find a more thoroughly Swiss archetype than Ruedi Rymann. In the Swiss public imagination he represented a combination of Swiss-German music and national sports. Most especially, he will be remembered as one of the great yodelling stars of our time. Yet despite the gold discs and international tours that made him a cultural icon, his feet were planted firmly in the soil. By profession, he was a man of the land; his life revolved around labouring, farming, cheese-making and forestry work. As a life, Rymann's reveals much about Swiss character and culture. Technically jodel is style of singing that switches between a head and a chest voice. The generally accepted theory is that it developed to carry and communicate over distances hill to vale, hill to hill. In its original form it was and is still largely viewed as a Swiss-German phenomenon. Over time, particularly since 1910, when a formal association the Eidgenössischer Jodlerverband (Swiss Yodelling Association) was founded, yodelling's many and various regional styles gained wider recognition and became a happy hunting ground for ethnomusicologists. But things changed in other ways, too, with yodelling finding a place in Switzerland's popular music, just as it had in <b>...</b>
Schacher Seppli Ruedi Ryman Swiss yodel yodler Popular Music
