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> Nicholas D. Kent" <ndkent@earthlink.net> wrote :

>I was looking at yesterday's digest and while the other real definition
>was okay, it makes it sound to me at least like some kind of serial
>orchestration technique, which it isn't. 

>It's an (old) orchestration technique very applicable to synth music.
>Another way of putting it is that hocketing is taking a line of a 
>musical melody and instead of having one instrument play the whole
>melody, the melody gets played a short phrase at a time by different
>instruments (timbres). In other words one instrument will play a phrase,
>then maybe 2 instruments will play the next phrase, then maybe one of
>them will play the next phrase doubled with a different instrument. When
>listened to you can follow the melody.

>That's a big failing for almost every imatator of Carlos. They would
>take a look at a classical score or piece of pop music, see a couple of
>instrument parts and give each instrument a synth sound for the whole
>piece, maybe twidleing a slider to show off or change the sound for the
>verse, chorus, bridge. When Carlos looks at say some Bach made up of say
>4 parts, she hockets up the parts into a whole complex arrangement. 

>It makes up in a completely different way for the lack of nuance on a
>per note basis that say a skilled soloist can coax out of a very
>expressive instrument. (as hocketing does not require an expressive
>instrument, just nice sounds)

>nick kent


Hi Nick,

'Hocketus', comes from the french word 'Hoquet' (hiccups): it
is a very ancient technique dating back to the Middle Ages. The story goes that it originated
 in European Monasteries  where some monks, allegedly intoxicated by their local Ale, 
used their 'hiccups' as a way to generate repetitive polyphonic choral structures. 
As each monk sang with a different pitch, timbre and envelope shaping of the mouth, 
the result was a system based on a polyphony of timbres.
Later on, the same technique was used in orchestral music.

Bye now,

Andre'