A Medieval Scholasticus and Renaissance Choirmaster

A Portrait of John Hothby at Lucca

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10424756
AutoresBenjamin Brand (University of North Texas, autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen63
Número3
Páginas754-806
Fecha de publicación2010-08-31
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaRenaissance Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0034-4338 • E-ISSN: 1935-0236
EditorialUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/656928
OpenAlexW1853420453
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas43

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

Appeal · Appropriation · Art · Art history · Choir · Counterpoint · Fifteenth · Honour · Linguistics · Literature · Pedagogy · Polyphony · Portrait · Sociology · The Renaissance · Visual arts · Classics · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · History · Law · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity