I put up a piece the other day by Anthony Genge called "New Hockets" and a friend of mine commented that it
"made me remember one very hot summer day when I had to walk barefoot over black pavement scattered with sharp bits of gravel."
Now the thing is that my friend is very knowledgeable about all things medieval and hocket, called 'hoquetus' in Latin, is a very medieval technique. Here are some great examples:
These hockets are from the Bamberg Codex, a manuscript containing 13th century French polyphony, including these seven pieces. So what is hocket exactly? It is a technique used in both vocal and instrumental music where a single line may be divided up between two or more voices or instruments. Early examples occur in the organum of Perotinus of Notre Dame in Paris who flourished around 1200. The seven examples heard in the clip above are from the second half of the 13th century and show the delightful effects you get when you speed up the process.
Here is how to hocket: take a single line, as in the first two measures of the example, and divide it between two voices, as in the second two measures.
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Here is how the beginning of the third hocket in the clip above starts. It's a lot more fun when you are in triple time. This piece starts around the 2:18 mark in the clip.
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And that is what is interesting about these hockets: they reveal to us musicians of a remote time, having a lot of fun. Now let's have a listen again to what a modern composer did with this idea:
I’m surprised actually at how much attention hocket has garnered as time has gone on. There’s even a guy who says that Hocket was invented 80,000 years ago in Africa. Just how he comes to know so confidently about anything, let alone hocketing, that went on 80,000 years ago in Africa is a little puzzling. I think there is some thing staring us in the face that we have failed to recognize. Ernest Sanders, when the origin paper came out, refused to believe that the hocket could have developed from other exotic ways up performing music. He wanted to trace it to ONE theorist and to ONE place, the Notre Dame school and nowhere else. He refused to believe or to see how music could evolve from the rearrangement of preexistent music A special way of playing. music — ergo hocket — one need, look no further than the situation with ragtime, where a piece would be taken and treated — “ragged” — the rhythm of the piece being treated in syncopation. Rarely did the syncopation go across the bar line and rarely, before the advent of music of the late 19th century specifically called ragtime, e.g., Scott Joplin. Scott Joplin’s music is not jazz, but the practice of ragging, adding syncopation, to an existing piece, which, in all likelihood coexisted with an early improvisatory music that existed together with ragtime constituted the basis for jazz, So also with hocket. Fisher was onto something when he traced the origin of the word hocket to the Arabic word for rhythm. More or less the same thing went down with hockeing that happened with ragtime. I think it’s Hironymous Grocheio. who says the Hocket and other kinds of music that, as I remember, he doesn’t name, is much beloved of young people for its sprightliness, and presumable danceability. I think it’s a mistake to limit the hocket the way it has been done, especially by some more recent writer who make it some sort of profound theological arcane secret-communication music. Its what it is. Music that’s lively and fun. It was probably only taken over into more serious church music from two things, the first crusade and the fun of letting your hair down with hocketing. I notice that no one points out that one meaning of a Hocket was a girl who liked to have a good time.
ReplyDeleteLiam Allan-Dalgleish
Thanks, Liam, for your learnéd observations. It took eleven years, but this post finally got a comment.
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