![]() ![]() My Wreck The Whistle 1238 radio show launched the anthropomusicological excursion into the puckered lip vocalization starring Morricone, the Whistling Gypsy, the Blind Whistler, an evangelical whistler, a kept-woman whistler, Finnish & Swedish whistlers, Otis Redding whistling outtakes, Tom Waits, Aphex Twin, Carla Bley, Toots Thielemans, Roger Miller, Elvis, Monty Python and Whistling Jack Smith. This curiosity remained dormant until quite recently. I finally got the hang of it, but only dared to do it wandering alone in a field. It offered him focus, calm, and - upon completion - an upbeat spring-bird whistle of personal fix-it triumph. Whistling has fascinated me since my childhood, when my father regularly whistled an unknown melody and I watched him purse his lips as he fixed anything and everything that broke around our house. There are definite similarities between yodeling and whistling - they're both a human oddity, under-regarded manipulations of the voice, not mastered by everyone, enabling whistlers to enchant, impress and even somewhat pleasantly kill the mundane workday. NOT! Unless, of course, I get a hankering to spend seven more years writing a book for a pauper's "salary" of under $500. ![]() Upon completion of my second yodel book, Yodel in HiFi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica, I almost took up a friend's half-joking-flattering suggestion that, since I was done with yodeling, I should now move on to whistling. In any case, existentialism never sounded better. You dig," as Clint Eastwood's cynical squint focuses on the gunsight's cross-hairs. those with loaded guns and those who dig. You can almost hear Sartre narrating: "there's two kinds of people. Morricone sound-sculpted not only the dread-clinging daily to our bones, but also an emotional landscape coaxed from sound, infused with melancholy whistling that mythologizes, almost ennobles, our survival in the process. When you hear the whistling (mixed with yodeled wails) on Morricone's spaghetti western soundtracks you feel it stretching across an endless moment where time sounds mockingly boundless, and meets the desert wind at the horizon. The most ominous whistling ever heard is found on movie soundtracks. Out to be just right since the murderer himself is off-balance mentally." ![]()
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