Yodeling and Meaning in American Music

<Yodeling and Meaning in American Music is the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. Based on the premise that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts it presents through a series of chronologically-ordered chapters an analysis of yodeling from its earliest appearances in European music to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Timothy Wise examines the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes? To answer such questions Wise investigates from the perspectives of critical musicology semiotics and cultural studies the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa in the first musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life. Maintaining a scholarly focus but keeping the general reader in mind Yodeling and Meaning in American Music examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing music as an art social class and gender. Individual chapters are devoted to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music to the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America to the Americanization of the yodel to Jimmie Rodgers and to cowboy yodeling among others.