With no mountains nearby to practice in, Austrian yodeling enthusiasts have found an unusual alternative — an underground parking garage that creates echoes similar to those heard in the Alps.
“It’s not too dissimilar to the high mountains,” yodeling teacher Anna Maria Gutschi said while leading a group of about 30 people through an empty parking garage earlier this week. “You have wide hallways; you have walls that reflect a lot.”
Gutschi works for the Styrian Volksliedwerk, a cultural organization that promotes traditional folk music in Graz, a city in southeastern Austria. Although Graz is not located in the high mountains, it sits in a flat basin surrounded by hills and low mountain ranges on the edge of the Alps.
The organization has been offering yodeling courses in unusual locations as a way of keeping the traditional art alive in modern times.
The sessions can be held in places ranging from underground car parks and canals to gas stations, as long as the acoustics are suitable. Up to 30 people can take part in each session.
“It’s a form of communication from mountain to mountain — just like that, without the need for a phone,” Gutschi said as she demonstrated the rising and falling sounds of yodeling.
“And it’s not as boring as writing an SMS. Sounds much better, too,” she added.
Gutschi described yodeling as a musical tradition in which the sound builds upward through different notes.
“The energy is rising, it’s rising and rising,” she told her students. “Ever higher and then it wants out on top and there it goes.”
For more than an hour, the group walked through Graz’s largest underground parking garage, practicing until they reached its deepest section, where the acoustics created the strongest echoes.
Some participants were experienced yodelers, while others were trying it for the first time.
Jamey Sohn, a South Korean student studying sustainable development in Graz, joined the course to experience Austrian culture.
“When I actually came here, it was a lot more — well, I wouldn’t say easy per se, but it’s a lot more approachable than I first expected,” Sohn said.
From Alpine communication to musical tradition
Yodeling developed centuries ago in the Alps as a way for people to communicate across long distances. It was also used between people and animals.
Cattle could recognize their owners’ voices and return to the stable from a distance.
Over time, the traditional form of singing developed into a musical genre and gained international popularity, particularly through the American musical film “The Sound of Music.”
For Thomas Button, a yodeling teacher originally from New York state, the practice is “like a form of meditation. Singing meditation.”
Local yodeling enthusiast Rudolf Schmidhofer said performing together creates a strong sense of energy and connection.
“It’s hard to describe how much power you get from yodeling together, the energy from within,” he said. “The togetherness, the polyphonic kind of yodeling where you must listen to each other.”
“I’m still a student when it comes to this, but I like it very much,” he added.