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A Medieval Scholasticus and Renaissance Choirmaster: A Portrait of John Hothby at Lucca*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
John Hothby's career as cathedral choirmaster at Lucca is one of the longest, best documented, and most exceptional of any Northern musician active in fifteenth-century Italy. As director of the cathedral school and choir, this Englishman embodied two models of music master: a scholastic trained in the old Trivium and Quadrivium, and a professional maestro di cappella. Fulfilling this double role was but one way in which Hothby differed from his fellow oltremontani by ingratiating himself with his Lucchese patrons, colleagues, and citizens at large. Another was the integration into his curriculum of older pedagogies of local and regional origin, ones designed to appeal to his Italian students. The most important example of such appropriation were the laude that formed a basis for his students’ exercises in two-voice mensural counterpoint. The latter appear in I-Lc, Enti religiosi soppressi, 3086, one of only two examples of student work to survive from before 1500. These newly discovered exercises thus illuminate not only Hothby's career, but also a hitherto obscure stage of learning by which aspiring singers progressed from strict, note-against-note discant to complex, florid polyphony.
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- Copyright © 2010 Renaissance Society of America
Footnotes
Condensed versions of this essay were presented in 2007 at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Vienna and the national meeting of the American Musicological Society in Quebec City. I thank Craig Wright for evaluating this work in its earlier stages, as well as Bonnie Blackburn, Pamela Starr, and Anne Walters Robertson for their comments on later drafts. Leofranc Holford-Strevens kindly refined my translation of the Appendix. All other translations are my own except where otherwise noted. Abbreviations for library sigla follow the conventions of Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM). Pitches that fall below middle C appear with a prime symbol (e.g., G′) while those that fall at middle C or higher appear without one. Documentary sources reckon in florins (Fl.), lire (£), and ducats. The value of one florin or ducat fluctuated between three and five-and-a-half lire.
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