Richard H Hoppin

Richard Hallowell Hoppin (Northfield, Minnesota, 1913 – Columbus, Ohio, 1991) was an American musicologist whose main field was the music of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. His work on the Cypriot-French repertory gave him a prominent place among specialists in medieval polyphony, and his textbook Medieval Music, published in 1978, became a widely used reference work.

He was educated at Carleton College, where he took his bachelor's degree in 1936, although he interrupted his studies for two years to attend the École Normale de Musique de Paris. He then pursued postgraduate studies at Harvard, where he was strongly influenced by Archibald T. Davison. He earned his master's degree in 1938 and taught for four years at Mount Union College. After military service he resumed his studies at Harvard, where he completed his doctorate in 1952. Between 1949 and 1961 he was a professor at the University of Texas and, in the latter year, took up the chair of music history at Ohio State University.

His research centred on manuscript J.II.9 of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin. Drawing on his articles, a facsimile edition and transcriptions, he reconstructed the musical life of the Cypriot court in the early fifteenth century and its links with contemporary musical activity in Western Europe. His publications, which include studies of notation, musica ficta and the origins of the cyclic Mass, are still cited in scholarship on the period.