Course: Music Theory IV
Week 4 – Friday: Interlocking Voices and Hocket
Hocket is the rapid exchange of single notes or tiny fragments between two or more voices so a melody sounds like it is bouncing around the ensemble. Medieval theorists called it hoquetus—Latin and Old French for “hiccup.”
In practice, one line is split into alternating events: Voice A handles beats 1, 3, 5… while Voice B fills 2, 4, 6… At slow tempos you clearly hear trades; at fast tempos the listener perceives a seamless single line infused with rhythmic interest.
Grab a partner and try this eight-pulse loop.
A five-note ascending line becomes one fluid idea when two singers alternate notes.
Each singer focuses on their cue numbers, but the audience perceives one steady five-note gesture.
Split a familiar tune to test coordination. We alternate every note so both voices see the full rhythm but only perform half of the events.
Challenge: rehearse until both lines breathe together and consonants land in sync. Once the handoff becomes effortless, increase the tempo.
This tool takes any short ABC melody and splits every other note into a complementary hocket. Voice 1 follows the pattern 1 0 1 0… while Voice 2 automatically receives the opposite 0 1 0 1…. Durations stay intact—only the performer assignment changes.
Default alternates every note. Enter “1,1,0,0” to trade every two notes, etc.
In the 13th century, composers at the Notre Dame school used a system of six rhythmic modes—repeating patterns of long (L) and breve (B) note values. Hocket was created by inserting rests into these pre-set patterns, with two voices alternating to create the complete rhythm.
| Mode | Note Values | Time Units per Note |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | L B, L B, L B, etc. | 2 1, 2 1, 2 1, etc. |
| 2. | B L, B L, B L, etc. | 1 2, 1 2, 1 2, etc. |
| 3. | L B B, L B B, etc. | 3 1 2, 3 1 2, etc. |
| 4. | B B L, B B L, etc. | 1 2 3, 1 2 3, etc. |
| 5. | L, L, L, etc. | 3, 3, 3, etc. |
| 6. | B B B, B B B, etc. | 1 1 1, 1 1 1, etc. |
Note: L = Long, B = Breve. Time units show the relative duration of each note.
Early 13th-century hocketing was limited to modes 1, 2, and 5. The following examples show normal (complete) rhythmic passages compared with their hocketed versions, where two voices alternate to create the same overall pattern.
Mode 1: L B, L B pattern becomes two interlocking voices
Mode 2: B L, B L pattern becomes alternating voices
Mode 5: L, L, L pattern with interlocking
Key Insight: Hocketing transforms a single melodic line into a dialogue between voices. Each voice rests while the other sounds, creating rhythmic energy and textural interest. This technique connects directly to the isorhythmic procedures we studied earlier this week—both involve systematic fragmentation and recombination of musical material.
Hocket (Latin hoquetus, Old French hoquet—“hiccup” or “sudden interruption”) named a precise contrapuntal device in 13th–14th-century motets and cantilenae. Medieval composers split a single melodic strand across two or more voices so that one sounds while another rests, creating an audible interruption effect.
The alternation in surviving sources often spans short passages rather than entire movements, and the pace is not always lightning fast. Later writers extend the term to modern interlocking textures, but the medieval definition centers on those brief, hiccup-like exchanges.
Hear the interlocking voices at work in this Ars Nova motet excerpt. Notice how individual syllables pop across the texture while the composite line stays uninterrupted.
The Hoquetus David is not just an example of hocket technique — it is the only surviving 14th-century piece composed entirely as a standalone hocket. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's 1980 analysis reconstructs, from evidence inside the score itself, the likely step-by-step procedure by which Machaut composed it. What follows traces that argument through the score.
The piece is written for three voices: Triplum (top), Hoquetus (middle), and Tenor (bottom). The tenor moves in long, slow note values drawn from a Gregorian chant melisma; the upper two voices trade notes and rests in rapid alternation — the hocket texture itself.
Notice already in these opening bars how the Triplum and Hoquetus rarely sound simultaneously — one moves while the other rests. Together they create what sounds like a single continuous melodic line.
Medieval theory (Franco of Cologne) required any hocket to be built on a cantus prius factus — a pre-existing melody. Machaut's source is the final melisma on the word "David" from the Alleluia verse Nativitas gloriose virginis. He organizes this 32-note chant fragment isorhythmically: repeating it in a fixed rhythmic pattern (talea) across multiple pitch statements (color).
The piece divides into two large sections with a 3:1 ratio of colores:
Section A = 88 bars. Section B = 35 bars. These numbers will matter.
Rather than analyzing each voice in isolation, Leech-Wilkinson examines the combined rhythm of all three voices together — the pattern of attacks across the entire texture at any given moment. This yields a vocabulary of just 20 distinct rhythmic cells, labeled a through t.
The table below (Ex. 3 from the article) catalogues all 20 cells with their frequency of occurrence in each section:
The proportional relationships that emerge are striking:
Leech-Wilkinson argues this cannot be coincidence. Machaut appears to have built the rhythmic structure of the piece to mirror its macro-level proportions in miniature.
Ex. 4 from the article encodes the entire piece bar-by-bar as a sequence of cell letters. Reading through it, you can see the vocabulary is tight — the same handful of cells recur constantly, while rare cells appear only once or twice:
The f cells (simultaneous full-bar rests in all three voices) function as structural pillars — placed at mathematically regular intervals to mark large-scale divisions, their long note values make them audible landmarks for the listener.
A single rhythmic cell in the combined texture can be distributed between the voices in many different ways. Cell a — the most common cell — appears in 17 different voice configurations across the piece. Ex. 6 from the article shows all of them:
This flexibility is what allows Machaut to maintain the strict proportional cell-count while also achieving near-perfect balance of sound and silence across the three voices — each voice ends up with approximately the same total duration of notes (~98½ longae) and rests (~24½ longae).
Ex. 2 from the article zooms in on one specific rhythmic pattern and shows how it is distributed across bars where it recurs — illustrating that the same cell-level rhythm can appear with different vertical combinations depending on which voice carries which note:
Leech-Wilkinson synthesizes the analysis into four likely compositional stages:
This sequence aligns with the description in Johannes Grocheo's treatise (c. 1330): compose a monophonic line, divide it between voices, then add overlapping material so the voices interlock.
Significance: The Hoquetus David is unusual precisely because its compositional logic is so transparent — the numbers line up too neatly to be accidental, giving us a rare window into how a 14th-century composer thought about musical coherence. Machaut unified the piece through symbolic numerical proportions, rhythmic economy, and the careful balance of sound and silence across independent voices.
Hocket technique appears in musical traditions across Africa, where interlocking patterns are fundamental to ensemble music-making. In this example of Ugandan flute hocketing, multiple players each contribute individual notes that interlock to create a complete melody—demonstrating that this technique predates and likely influenced medieval European practices.
Listen for how each musician plays only their assigned pitches, yet the composite result is a flowing, continuous musical line:
Voices alternate every note:
Voice 1: C . E . G .
Voice 2: . D . F . A
Larger chunks swap between parts so each fragment breathes before the handoff.
Entries overlap slightly, creating a denser counterpoint that still outlines a single contour.
Identical rhythms move through changing timbres for kaleidoscopic orchestration effects.
This hocket lesson concludes our four-week exploration of rhythm. Use this review to prepare for your unit test, which covers all the concepts below.