The hocket, a device commonly employed in medieval and early Renaissance music, involves the interruption of a melodic line with rests and the distribution of a melody's notes between two or more instruments or voices. The term is etymologically related to the word "hiccup," and a hocket can indeed often sound like a rhythmic disruption, or hiccup. Most often the hocket is found in the midst of a vocal motet or chanson. There are a few instrumental hockets, however, one of which is the Hoquetus David—Guillaume de Machaut's only instrumental composition, which likely dates from the 1360s. Why the work was written is unknown, although it may have been somehow associated with the coronation of Charles V in Reims in 1364; Charles had spent some time at Machaut's house three years earlier and was one of his several patrons.

The work's title derives from the source of the tenor part of this three-part piece, the melisma on "David" from Machaut's Alleluia verse "Nativitas gloriose virginis." Machaut does not specify the instruments to be used in his Hoquetus, which is among the earliest known polyphonic instrumental pieces. In sound it resembles a fanfare, with the alternating notes giving something of the effect of an antiphonal call-and-response. The angular quality of the piece, and its occasional dissonance, has inspired several modern composers, including Peter Maxwell Davies, who made an arrangement of the work for soprano and ensemble in 1971.

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