When the Exotic is Home
March 3, 2008 at 12:01 p.m.
When the Exotic is Home
On Saturday morning at the Blue Note, the documentary-style Echoes of Home brought the exotic to Mid-Missouri in the form of Swiss yodeling and Tuvan throat singing. Two diverse singers, Stefan Schwietat and Erika Stucky combined the traditional sounds of their homeland with personal experiences and aesthetics. Though from the same area of the world, these Swiss artists approached the task quite differently. After battling an illness that affected his perceptive and language abilities, Schwietat turned to combining environmental sounds with traditional methods of yodeling to create a very personal interpretation of home, mixing past practices - when yodeling was both an intimate communicating with nature and the self as well as in dialogue with your neighbor – with a contemporary landscape, where the machine (in his case, a train) invades the garden. Schwietat relied not only on his native customs and modern-day landscapes, but the sounds of Tuvan nomads, whose country borders Mongolia, for the eerie aural quality of throat singing, in which performers literally sound two pitches, a fundamental tone and an overtone, simultaneously.
On the other hand, Stucky used her youth growing up on the California west coast to infuse her view of tradition with a certain brashness and lack of fear to create new, but no less heartfelt, versions of old practices. A third performer, Noldi Alder, brought the most authentic interpretation of tradition center stage, carrying on the profession of musician for which a family of singers paved the way. The Alder musicians made the Swiss equivalent of the von Trapp family image come to life, committed to carrying on folk music even if, as one musician stated, it means wearing the traditional costume all my life.
How does Switzerland (or any area of the world) sound? What are the sounds of home? Exotic to us perhaps, but a source of soothing familiarity for others. In Echoes of Home, the audience was forced to see beyond the exoticism of uncommon sounds and vocal techniques to the inner responses to a native landscape that makes us more the same than different.
— Judith Mabary, Ph.D.
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