A Ranz des Vaches or Kuhreihen is a simple melody traditionally played on the horn by the Swiss Alpine herdsmen as they drove their cattle to or from the pasture. The Reverend James Wood, writing in the Nuttall Encyclopaedia in 1907, said that such a tune "when played in foreign lands, produces on a Swiss an almost irrepressible yearning for home", repeating 18th century accounts the mal du Suisse or nostalgia diagnosed in Swiss mercenaries.
The Kuhreihen were romanticized in the wake of the Unspunnenfest of 1805 in a collection edited by G. J Kühn and J. R. Wyss. The fourth edition of 1826 gave scores for piano and was luxuriously illustrated, its intended market the educated early tourists to Switzerland. The collection also influenced the Swiss yodel that was emerging at the time.
A famous example of a Ranz des Vaches melody is the English horn and Flute solo in the third section of the overture to Gioachino Rossini's opera William Tell.
Henry David Thoreau compared the song of the wood thrush to a ranz des vaches: "So there is something in the music of the cow-bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink. This thrush’s song is a ranz des vaches to me. I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me." [1]
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