Mountain Geist: Swiss Alpine Body and Song, 1700–1900

Between c.1700 and 1900, Swiss Alpine song was used as a tool to cultivate mountainous aspects within human bodies. Scholarship on Alpine song in this period typically focuses on the subgenre of the ranz des vaches, a herding melody rumored in the early eighteenth century to elicit morbid nostalgia for the Alps. English-language literature on the subject typically emphasizes the use of the ranz des vaches in art music, and Swiss literature takes a folkloric and ethnomusicological approach, but Swiss literature is rarely, if ever, available in English.This dissertation considers the cultural-historical context for how Alpine song was understood a tool to connect with the Swiss Alps, and explores what it meant to cultivate Alpine virtues in a body. I consider four main instances: first, the physiological or medical implications of Swiss Alpine song from 1710–c.1800, second, how song was used to cultivate Swiss identity by invoking the Alps from 1767–1815, third, how music was used in a voyeuristic way by tourists and aristocrats to experience the Alps in the nineteenth century, and fourth, how song styles were used to delineate who did and did not belong in the high mountains at the end of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to discuss the mountains without discussing Älpler, the people who live in the Alps. Most of my sources are from the upper classes and lowlands; the input from Älpler themselves is astonishingly limited. This study thus becomes a cultural history of projections: the aristocratic ideal of the Älpler is expected to embody the low-lander’s ideal of the mountains. It is also, in a way, a history of voyeurism: this connection between Älpler and Alp is evidenced through song, a fascinatingly intangible but nonetheless sensible object that aristocrats can use to get a glimpse of a rarefied world they had constructed themselves. We find that Alpine song took on the significance of a sentinel species for other cultural anxieties, like disease, modernism, and nationalism, and it offers a rich opportunity to explore how landscape and sound are invoked in notions of morality