John Hothby (''Otteby'', ''Hocby'', ''Octobi'', ''Ottobi'', 1410–1487), also known by his Latinised names Johannes Ottobi or Johannes de Londonis, was an English Renaissance
music theorist
Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory". The first is the " rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation (k ...
and composer who travelled widely in Europe and gained an international reputation for his work.
Biography
Little is known of the origins or early life of John Hothby. He appears to have left England after 1435 but most of the references to him in surviving sources are to the last twenty years of his life, by which time he had taken
holy orders as a
Carmelite monk and he claimed in his own work to have travelled in Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, before he went to a monastery in Ferrara and then in 1467 took employment in
Lucca
Lucca ( , ) is a city and ''comune'' in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the Serchio River, in a fertile plain near the Ligurian Sea. The city has a population of about 89,000, while its province has a population of 383,957.
Lucca is known as one ...
, probably teaching music at the Cathedral.
[T. Dumitrescu, ''The early Tudor court and international musical relations'' (Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, 2007), p. 197.] In 1486 he was recalled to England by the new king
Henry VII and appears to have died in the north of England in the following year.
Work and influence
Surviving compositions include six sacred Latin works and three secular Italian songs. Exactly which works on music theory Hothby wrote is unclear and some older works may have been attributed to him and some contemporary works often given under this name may have been written by another author Johannes de Anglia.
Work generally attributed to him includes ''La Capiopea Legale'' and ''Proportiones Secundum''. Surviving work suggests that he was a traditionalist, defending the
Pythagorean tuning and
Guidonian pitch in the face of reforms proposed by
Bartolomé Ramos de Pareja Bartolomé Ramos de Pareja (ca. 1440 – 1522) was a Spanish mathematician, music theorist, and composer. His only surviving work is the Latin treatise ''Musica practica''.
By his own testimony at the end of his ''Musica practica'', Ramos de Pa ...
, but is chiefly notable for modifications to the pitch system to accommodate sharp and flat notes. His work was widely known in Britain and continental Europe and he may have been the most important figure in communicating musical ideas of the
Contenance Angloise
The ''Contenance angloise'', or English manner, is a distinctive style of polyphony developed in fifteenth-century England which uses full, rich harmonies based on the third and sixth. It was highly influential in the fashionable Burgundian court ...
between England and the continent.
[T. Dumitrescu, ''The Early Tudor Court and International Musical Relations'' (Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, 2007), p. 199.]
References
Further reading
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hothby, John
1487 deaths
English composers
Renaissance composers
Composers of the Tudor period
Year of birth uncertain
15th-century English people
English music theorists
English male classical composers
English classical composers