Hocket(ing)

We would be remiss in our ongoing discussion of innovative vocal techniques if we didn't bring up the New York band Dirty Projectors.  The band is the project of Yale-educated musician David Longstreth, who most notably uses a trio of female vocalists to help him with his songs.  The band uses a variety of unusual harmonies and chords, and I'm sure a music theorist can explain what they do a lot better than we can, but a great explanation of hocketing, one of the many tools in their musical arsenal, was provided by writer Sasha Frere Jones in The New Yorker back in 2009:

Longstreth employs a method for arranging voices known as hocketing, which stretches back to the work of thirteenth-century French monks. To hocket, you split up a melody or a chord and assign the notes to different voices. (It’s like an advanced version of those Sesame Street segments where Muppets individually say the syllables of a word and then combine to say the entire word together.) When voices begin to hocket (the word is related to “hiccup”), the sound starts to flicker and pop, as if the chords and melodies were multiplying like soap bubbles. (Hocketing is the mirror ball of arranging.) The effect is most striking live. There’s your band, standing still, but the music is rotating all over the stage.

Sometime around 2011, we were fortunate enough to hear Dirty Projectors perform Beautiful Mother live during their show at Variety Playhouse.  The video above, or any recording for that matter, can't quite capture the full effect of hearing hocketing and the ensuing harmony performed live.  The shimmering effect of  the sound waves and harmonic interference patterns is almost like a tangible sheet of sound being unfurled over the heads of the audience.  It's astonishing, and you immediately want to hear it again and fortunately the band is generous enough that they hit it three times in the song, but like all good magicians, they don't repeat the trick enough times to let it become mundane.  It's one of our all-time favorite live-music experiences, and we've never heard anyone quite match that particular feat of magic since.

As Frere Jones points out, hocketing goes back to 13th-Century French monks and certainly wasn't invented by Longstreth and Dirty Projectors.  Nor were they the first to introduce it to modern music.  Here's American treasure (and guest Zen Mountain Monastery singing teacher) Meredith Monk's 1990 composition, Hocket, performed live at Judson Church in NYC.

Like a lot of other things in rock 'n' roll music, hocketing wasn't just adapted from other musical traditions but it was also amplified and played faster and louder.  Dirty Projectors' hocketing is done a lot quicker than by chamber-music vocalists (Dirty Projector band rehearsals are apparently quite long, Frere Jones notes), but one of the many things we like about the Monk composition is that the languid pace breaks the process down and lets you observe just how the process actually works (the magician allows you to see the sleight of hand). What we like about the Dirty Projectors' version is that they whip the technique out in a flash and instantly amaze the audience with the flickering and popping sheets of sounds shimmering over their heads (just listen to the spontaneous, mid-song cheers and applause).   

In all fairness, though, Longstreth is equally candid and also shows how the trick is done.  Here's a 2009 interview with Longstreth, and to demonstrate exactly what hocketing is and how it works, he brings Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian onstage with him, and starting around the 7:25 mark, they break the technique down for all the world to see how it's done.  What concerns us here is that the explanation is not unlike that of the juggler who once tried to explain how he did it, and then having explained, wasn't able to juggle again.

Big Ears scorecard:  Meredith Monk will be performing this year, Dirty Projectors won't.