Largely forgotten

A jewel of a sentence from Wikipedia:

Jean Daetwyler (January 24, 1907, Basel—June 4, 1994, Sierre) was a Swiss composer and musician. He is remembered mostly for his largely forgotten works for alpenhorn.

Some photos

Arkady Shilkloper and the rest of Pago Libre at a house concert

Vineyards in Lavaux, east of Lausanne

Kurt Ott showing me how to breathe.

The pretty horn I'm playing was delivered to his house the morning I got there.

Cathedral of trees at the university.

The altar is Lake Léman

Lake Lucerne

And some unfortunately-named businesses:

Some kind of printing company in Lausanne.

Their website doesn't explain the acronym, but innocently claims:

Thinking of FAG, draws one’s mind instinctively to proof presses.
FAG is in fact almost synonym with proof.

A jeweler's in Zürich. Definitely unintentional.

Vote

Yesterday Swiss voters approved an initiative to amend the federal constitution so that foreign nationals who commit certain crimes in Switzerland are automatically deported, and forbidden to reenter the country within 5-20 years depending on the crime. The UDC, the party that sponsored the initiative, put up some pretty arresting posters (so to speak):

"Ivan S., rapist and soon Swiss? No to the counter-project [a milder alternative to the initiative]"

"Yes to the expulsion initiative"

Yes, that second one is a white sheep kicking a mean-looking black sheep off of its territory. I'm reasonably sure that this imagery would not fly in the US.

Here in Lausanne, where only 35.5% of the population voted in favor, this poster was defaced in eight different ways:

Stores around the city put up this one in reply:

"Sheep vote UDC"

and this one (which I don't really get):

"We are all foreign criminals"

The initiative still has to be turned into an amendment and approved by Parliament, so for now, I won't necessarily be sent home for committing armed robbery (woo!). The text of the initiative is fairly vague, which means that the offenses punished by automatic expulsion could be limited to the crimes it lists explicitly like rape, murder, human trafficking, and abuse of social benefits. Or it could be expanded to include more minor infractions. My Swiss roommate was teasing my French roommate that she'd be sent home for running a red light.

Amnesty International has been arguing that this change could could violate the Geneva Convention by having refugees sent back to countries where they face torture or death.

If you look at a map, the vote was basically a clean split between German-speakers (for) and French-speakers (against):

Source: Basler Zeitung

Swiss Lady

This video is

• Switzerland's entry in the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest (it came in 6th but topped the Swiss charts at the time)
• the first time an alphorn was used in a widely-popular rock song
• a strong candidate for the next wave of rickrolling, I think.

You can skip the first 23 seconds if you're impatient.

hornroh

A big perk of meeting Balthasar Streiff and his alphorn quartet hornroh (get it?) was getting to do my first mountainside interview, on the Oberalppass between Andermatt and Sedrun. WNR has a pretty nice sound booth, but:

The band was there to perform at the nighttime inauguration of a little Rotterdam lighthouse, newly built on the pass to mark one of the two sources of the Rhine (which, as you might guess, meets the sea in Rotterdam among other places). Supposedly, the powers that be also want to put a large riverboat up there at 6700 ft. A fairly creative way to draw tourists.

The group, hornroh, typically plays in interesting locations -- on shopping center escalators, underneath bridges, and maybe soon, they hope, in construction sites (apparently it's hard to get permission for that). Streiff, the band's founder, started out as a sculpture student, and was particularly interested in large-scale outdoor installations (e.g. "The Gates"). He says he sees an analogy in music, another way of embellishing a space.

Streiff, 47, is better known for being the alphorn half of an alphorn-and-yodeling duo called Stimmhorn (I especially like this song of theirs) that no longer exists but was popular in its day. He also collaborated with a Swiss shakuhachi player for a while, but that never really took off. I asked if there was any instrument he wouldn't want to play with -- "Piano. It's horrible." He says you couldn't find anything further from the alphorn: there's the equal temperament/just intonation clash, the different use of overtones, the striking a string instead of buzzing into a tube. I'm not sure this really makes sense, because by those criteria, shakuhachi (or balafon etc.) is just as different from alphorn as piano.

Around 4 PM, a heavy fog rolled into the pass:

Taking advantage of the venue, hornroh had choreographed a performance where each of the four alphorn players, plus the yodeler and drummer who were joining them, started out from a different place around the pass. There were spotlights on the musicians, but with all the fog you couldn't see most of them, and just heard mournful sounds coming out of distant glowing clouds in the dark.

Among the many instruments hornroh used were the "alpophone" (an alphorn bent twice like a saxophone, so it's easier to play while walking) and the "didjeriphone" (an alpophone with a didjeridu mouthpiece):

More on unusual alphorns later.

On a totally different subject, today was the day when the two teams drilling the Gotthard Base Tunnel -- now the longest train tunnel in the world at 35 miles -- met in the middle under Sedrun, only a few miles from the Oberalppass. I considered going over there, but was told there wouldn't be much to see...