Rattlebrained

One of the main problems with blogging is that when you have lots of stuff to blog about it often means that you have a lot to do which means you don’t have much time to blog… And so it has been the last few days, so hopefully (do I really want that?) life will calm down enough to catch up (no).

_{(Photo © Rhythmics.ch)}

A few weeks ago I finally joined the Rhythm Bones Society, something I had been wanting to do for a while, and with their greetings I received one of their newsletters of a few years back in which there was an article about Klepperle / Chlefeli “rhythm bones” from south eastern Germany and north eastern Switzerland. I found that kind of funny since I had never heard of them nor had anyone who saw me play around here said: hey, that’s like an instrument they play in certain parts of German speaking Switzerland”… OK, so it’s a fact that the linguistic parts of Switzerland are culturally further apart than mere distance measured, but still…

Check out some some traditional Swiss “roots” music with a Chlefeli player

Fortunately the newsletter had a link to Rhythmics, so with the help of google translate I was able to learn a bit more about these “clappers”, as they are called on that website, and even order a pair which came in the mail yesterday!

I took them along for an afternoon walk in the snow covered landscape just out of town and tried them out. They are very loud! The fact that the player in the video can play as softly as he is (everything being relative) suddenly becomes very impressive indeed.

Compared to rhythm bones (and keep in mind that I’ve only have a years experience playing them), Chlefeli are a lot easier to hold because of their shape. But I had to give them more impulsion to get them to click, all the weight is underneath your fingers and they are chunkier than bones, I also had to concentrate on avoiding tightening the pressure of my middle and ring fingers; the Chlefeli between them wasn’t going to fly off like a bone can and the pressure just prevented it from moving as freely as wanted.

It will be fun to play with them in the band, we’ll have to write a Swiss Blues for them.
:-)

Updated April 13th ’10 to correct my spelling, thanks to Peo Oertli-Kassim who is behind the Rhythmics website: “the name for the instrument is ‘Chlefeli’ (Chlefäli) – the verb is chlefele (chlefälä)”