In Graz, yodelers trade Alpine peaks for a parking garage's echoes

Yodeling fans in the Austrian city of Graz have found an unlikely substitute for the Alps: an underground parking garage. The space, they say, produces echoes similar to those heard in high mountain landscapes.

"It's not too dissimilar to the high mountains," yodeling teacher Anna Maria Gutschi said as she led a group of about 30 through an empty 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. The city lies in a flat basin ringed by hills and low mountain ranges at the edge of the Alps, rather than in the high mountains themselves.

The group has been running a series of yodeling courses in unusual locations to keep the tradition alive in modern times. An underground car park, a canal or a gas station can all serve, as long as the acoustics work; each session admits up to 30 participants.

Gutschi described yodeling as a form of communication from mountain to mountain, one that once removed the need for a phone. She said it is more engaging than writing a text message and sounds better too. Explaining the melodic tradition to her students, she described energy that rises steadily until it "wants out on top."

For more than an hour, the yodelers walked through the city's largest underground parking garage, practicing until they reached its deepest point, where the sound conditions were best. Experienced yodelers and newcomers alike were welcome in the subterranean class.

Jamey Sohn, a student from South Korea studying sustainable development in Graz, joined to immerse herself in Austrian culture. She said the practice turned out to be more approachable than she had first expected.

Yodeling emerged centuries ago as a way of communicating across long distances in the Alps, not only between people but also between people and animals. Cattle would recognize their owner's voice and return to the stable from far away. Over time the primeval form of singing evolved into its own musical genre, first popularized internationally by the U.S. musical film "The Sound of Music."

For Thomas Button, a teacher originally from New York state, yodeling is "like a form of meditation. Singing meditation."

Local enthusiast Rudolf Schmidhofer said the power of yodeling together is hard to describe. He pointed to the togetherness and the polyphonic style, in which singers must listen to one another. "I'm still a student when it comes to this, but I like it very much," he added.