A MedievalScholasticusand Renaissance Choirmaster: A Portrait of John Hothby at Lucca^*

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.