stevenarntson (Artist)

I'm a yodeling concertina player in Seattle, Washington. (I wonder if I could say, "I am the world's only yodeling concertina player"?) I've released a couple of efforts here on the FMA, and am placing two tracks from my newest here under a CC Attribution license.

The album, titled Bildungsroman, consists of some heartfelt yodels interspersed with solo concertina instrumentals influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee." The tracks were recorded in a two-mile-long abandoned train tunnel hidden off a mountain pass here in Washington State.

I'm releasing one yodel and one instrumental on the FMA, and I hope people will trade and sample them. I think they have potential! I also hope you'll buy the whole album if it seems worthwhile. I'm selling it at Bandcamp through my website, stevenarntson.info. Click the music link and you'll go straight there. This is somewhat of an experiment for me--I've never tried to sell my music online before, but I thought I'd give it a whirl. Viva the hybrid economy!

I’m going to try to make a biweekly blog post this year (of the twice-per-month variety, not twice-weekly). When I asked for advice about what theme(s) I should pursue, I was encouraged to focus on my interests, so I’ve decided to call this series Enthusiasms. As my enthusiasms tend toward the fitful, I hope they’ll make entertainingly brief blog entries. I’m a musician and writer with an aimless but sincere interest in classical and avant music, poetry, world traditions, and prog rock.

I ended 2009 unexpectedly fascinated with yodeling, spurred by my purchase of World Music Network’s excellent 2006 CD The Rough Guide To Yodel. Yodeling, which had always seemed silly to me, suddenly seemed great. Rather than trying to help singers keep their voices from cracking, yodeling asks that they make a virtue of necessity. Physiologically, yodeling involves a basic fact of human vocal production: there is a boundary, or break, between singing registers, commonly termed “normal” voice and “falsetto.” There is also considerable debate about the nature of the mechanism, with some suggestion that yodel effects may be produced differently by men and women (see the link to Timothy Wise’s essay, further down). Here is a video from the UW of a vocal endoscopy that shows the switch between normal voice and falsetto.

Outside of European art music, there’s been considerable yodeling. An excellent essay from Excavated Shellac covers some theories about the development of the practice, and references this beautiful recording of alpine yodeling, hosted at the Free Music Archive: