New Hockets II


clarinet, marimba and piano (1992-95)


Duration: ca. 10 minutes



New Hockets II, like its companion piece, New Hockets  for flute and piano, was initially inspired by a set of pieces found in the ‘Bamberg Codex’, a late thirteenth-century manuscript.  These seven pieces are believed by some to be among the earliest surviving examples compositions intended  specifically for instrumental performance.  In addition to that distinction, these pieces also display a very sophisticated musical construction based on the the technique of ‘hocket’. 


As described at the time, a hocket was “a sort of music sounded in a broken way by actual sounds and their omission”, in other words, it involved the dividing up of a single melodic line into 2 or more parts. As this was most often in a short-long rhythmic pattern it was thought to resemble a hiccup (hocket is Latin for hiccup).  This technique was very popular with composers in the late 13th and 14th centuries and eventually a Papal edict was required to ban its vigorous melodic and rhythmic style!


In addition to quoting music from one of the pieces in the the Bamberg collection, New Hockets II   makes use of a similar technique, dividing of the musical line between the clarinet, marimba and piano, with  the  combination of the three parts forming the overall musical pattern.   The dividing of the musical line between the three instruments also often takes the form of a canon (one voice following another),  at first involving only a few notes, but eventually, near the end of the piece, working through  all 12 chromatic pitches.


In New Hockets II, this dividing of the musical line, between the clarinet, marimba and piano, sometimes takes the form of a musical canon (one voice following another) and sometimes results in separate  patterns, where the combination of the three parts forms the total pattern.


Although hocket as a musical device is associated with European music of the Middle Ages, it is also quite frequently found in the music of other cultures, most notably in Indonesian and African music.