Sunday, May 4, 2008

Bringing it all together ...

We've just returned from a wonderful long weekend in the French-speaking Alpine village of Nendaz. The 2-day Alphorn course offered us an opportunity to reconnect to one of our first passions in life and the one that brought us together back in 1987: music. It also offered a chance to connect this passion to our love of the mountains and surprisingly, to our love of sport. (More on the last one later!) We felt very fortunate to have studied music as kids and later in college - it certainly helped in our ability to learn this traditional Alpine instrument. After a few hours of lessons, we were able to make music on the Alphorn -- and in a spectacular setting. We recorded some video on the second day of the course, so please envision yourself enjoying a glass of wine while sitting on a sunny terrace in the Alps hearing the following:



We felt such a strong connection to this instrument that we found an Alphorn maker with a shop just a couple hours from Nendaz, visited him Friday evening, and actually bought two carbon fiber Alphorns. On Saturday we biked part of the Tour de Romandie professional bike race mountain stage with an Alphorn on my back, with the plan to play it as the peleton cycled by. This lead to one of the most interesting and exciting blending of passions, tradition, technology, sport, nature, languages, culture, and people. What a fantastic experience!

More on our new Alphorns and the crazy American couple playing the Alphorn at the Tour de Romandie in the next post!

Cheers,
Jeff

5 comments:

Traveling Bells said...

Mighty impressive sound and scenery! Hmmm, how 'bout a pic of the 'jr.' horn version!

Runner.Dude said...

OMG, I don't know whether to fall out of my chair from amazement or laughter. Y'all sound fantastic! I can't wait to hear the live version. (Maybe I'll yodel along.)

-M

Anonymous said...

You guys rock! Are you taking any requests yet? I think Def Leopard would sould great on those things. ;-) Thanks for the backdrop as well. Did you edit in the birdsong?

Manser

chocolate girl said...

Okay, that's just over the top cool! You two are too too much. Thanks so much for the vid and pics...amazing!

Anonymous said...

Wow, that sounded pretty good. We'll look forward to the live version next time we're in Zurich. You guys are awesome! I can't wait to see your pics from the Tour de Romandie, I'll try to post a couple of ours from Sunday's stage, too (without alp horns unfortunately).