Musical Hiccuping is a technique in music where a harmonic, rhythmic, or melodic idea is divided up and shared between more than one voice or musician. In the lens of the Western Art Music/”Classical” tradition, this technique is known as “hocketing.” It was “invented” in Medieval France, and was a popular game of sorts among musicians and composers.
However, this musical tradition exists across many musical cultures across the globe. Inuit throat singing, Balinese Gamelan, Ghanaian singing and Water Drumming among the Baka forest people all employ forms of musical hiccuping, as well as more contemporary musics such as Plunderphonics and Turntablism. So is it really appropriate to use the word “hocketing” to describe this technique? In a presentation that Tyler Schmit and I put together last year, we explored how using ‘hocketing’ as a catch-all term for this practice promotes an exclusionary, Euro-centric world view where musical practices need to be defined and legitimized through European terminology. We propose that using the term ‘musical hiccuping’ is a more inclusive and open term for the practice that puts these traditions on a more even playing field of legitimacy.
Found below is a file of a lesson plan that teachers can use to teach about ‘musical hiccuping’ to their classes. This lesson plan includes Learning Objectives, First Peoples’ Principles of Learning, Pre-requisite and Environment considerations, Materials and Equipment needs, Teaching Sequence, and Assessment strategy.
Also included are three videos that show our lesson in practice. The lesson has been divided into three separate videos.
Reflection:
I am still unclear on how to embed Youtube video into my blog posts. The steps that I follow seem not to work properly. UPDATE: I have learned how to do this! Additionally, I’m still learning how to create infographics. At this point, I don’t know how to use Canva properly to do this. Finally, I need to find new methods and tools for including more diverse and multimodal media in my posts.
hayley October 13, 2023
Thanks for posting Rhys, I love how you circle back and update as you develop the skills you need. Your lesson seems like a lot of fun, and your question about white-washing got me thinking about dance. Sometimes, things in character work like Polka get to retain their cultural roots (Pulka means half-step in Czech) but otherwise ballet vocab is generally French and I honestly don’t know where the steps were originating from, but I doubt they all came from France/Europe so by inventing a universal vocabulary (I don’t speak French, I do speak ballet) without acknowledging the terms may have cultural variation/overlap can be pretty diminishing when it could have otherwise been a beautiful point of connection.