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...