The world is in a febrile state. Europe is watching Russian aggression into Ukraine while the Middle East and parts of Africa remain unstable as China flexes in Asia. Still, the increasingly sidelined United Nations has its priorities firmly in place.
On Friday UNESCO confirmed it is giving stern consideration to Switzerland’s hopes to have yodeling protected as a world heritage listing.
Yes, really.
The Swiss want the ancestral sing-song tradition, closely associated with falsetto-bellowing male herders intoning alongside giant Alphorns on verdant hillsides, examined for inclusion on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list when the U.N. culture body convenes from December 8 to 13.
AFP reports the stakes are as high as a yodel top note:
Switzerland currently counts some 12,000 keen yodellers lilting their way through the style’s distinctive topsy-turvy up-and-down melodies across 780 yodelling clubs.
Keen yodellers can also be found in the mountains of neighbouring Austria and Germany.
But unlike in 2020, when Switzerland teamed up with France to seek recognition for the Jura region’s history of watchmaking, the Swiss have decided to honour their tradition of splendid isolation and forge ahead to seek yodelling recognition alone
“This is important for the future,” Markus Egli, choir director at the Buergerturner Yodel Club in Lucerne, told AFP on the sidelines of a concert in the picturesque peak-fringed city this week.
“This singing is part of our culture, of Switzerland’s identity,” he said, adding that yodelling began as “a means of communication between one mountain and another.”
Yvonne Eichenberger, who sings soprano in the choir, explained that yodelling was technically taxing as it required switching swiftly between low chest notes and the upper octaves of the singer’s head voice.
WATCH: Yo-de-lay-UNESCO? Germany’s Franz “Franzl” Lang, known as the Yodel King, shows how its done
“It requires time and practise,” the 35-year-old reflected to AFP.
The Swiss government says at least 12,000 yodellers take part through the years courtesy of about 780 groups of the Swiss Yodelling Association.
Last year, Japan’s famed sake — the smooth rice wine — was one of more than 60 honorees in the UNESCO intangible heritage list, alongside things like the Nowruz spring festival in parts of central Asia, and the skills and knowledge of zinc roofers in Paris.
The U.S. severed ties with UNESCO earlier this year after the Trump administration said it had strayed from its original mission, as Breitbart News reported.
The decision came after months of internal review triggered by Trump’s executive orders in February which withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, defunded the UNRWA, and launched a top-to-bottom audit of U.S. ties to the U.N. system.
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