ABSTRACT
Harrison Birtwistle is having Machaut 'his way' even more in Hoquetus Petrus, up to the point that it can be understood as a self-portrait in which the Artes Novae of the fourteenth and of the twentieth centuries are combined. Birtwistle's Hoquetus Petrus, written in 1995, is example of the composer's continuing interest in the medieval technique of hocket, whereby sounds and silences are dovetailed contrapuntally between two or more voices. Contemporary music composers – especially those who aimed at replacing instead of merely adapting the nineteenth-century aesthetic categories – identified with the equally isolated position of medieval music. As composers and as performers, Birtwistle and his Manchester fellow students Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr and John Ogdon were looking for alternatives to the established classical–romantic music culture and it is all too accommodating twentieth-century 'modernization'. The key for Birtwistle's changed attitude towards hocket may well be the dedicatee of Hoquetus Petrus.
