Ranz des vaches

Did you know that the ‘ranz des vaches’ that is found on some cylinder musical boxes is not a single tune but a genre of tunes? These airs are thought to be based on tunes or songs used by cattle herders to call their animals home from the mountain pastures of Switzerland hundreds of years ago.  If you listen carefully, you can imagine this happening, as the melodies are fairly simple, although the arrangements on a musical box can embellish them to make them more interesting.  There is not a lot of information about this topic which has intrigued listeners over the years; the ‘composers’ of the original tunes were anonymous.  However, there is a school of thought which thinks that this form of music may have become artificially popular, and put onto musical boxes to appeal to British travellers looking for a souvenir of their ‘grand tour’ of Europe. Elsewhere people have recorded how Swiss mercenaries enlisted in foreign armies were forbidden to listen to these tunes for fear they would become so homesick as to die!  US Academic Emily Loeffler wrote a whole dissertation on the relationship between music, nostalgia and homesickness, in which she acknowledges the assistance she obtained from the Musical Box Society of Great Britain in her research.