Back to raybro's Home Page Musica Ficta is one of the most interesting, and continually controvercial, aspects of notation and music
practis before the 18th century. Simply, Music Ficta is the unnotated chromatic alteration of note
pitches, based on a set of unstated (or rarely stated) rules
. Because the theory upon which this century-and-a-half of composition was based consisted of a
modal view of harmony, rather than a key-based view, many aspects of music could be left to
shorthand or not stated at all. Each musician could be expected to understand, intrinsically, what was
wanted for `accidentals', or to be in the presence of a music master who would tell them what to do.
It is quite possible that more blood has been metaphorically spilled over the question of what is proper
in the application of accidentals to modern transcriptions of renaissance and baroque music, than any
other single facet of musicology. In the early half of the century, all renaissance and baroque music was
automatically `corrected', so that all tritones were `repaired', all cadances were approached by leading
tones, etc. In general, this can be termed the `classicalifying of Early Music.' The results were often
bland, and when coupled with equal temperaments for which the music was not intended, made the
music seem barbaric, unlovely, and just grounds for an attitude that modern instruments, music, and
practice were the just and proper evolutionary heros of a struggle to escape such noise.
In the third quarter of this century, a revival in interest in early music became a sudden rush, and
students of musicology became performers, while performers became students of musicology. The
result was a greater focus on practice, and a delving into the tretises and theory manuals of the period.
And with the discovery of modality, came a sudden reaction against classicalification, resulting in a
wonderful variety of direct-transcription-without-editing. The results, though a passing fad (and I'd be
hard-pressed to point to actual cases of records/CD's showing this momentary madness) were
predictably bizarre, but prepared the public for a more reasoned approach, which we are now
enjoying, where the rules for musica ficta, while hardly agreed upon, have become a small set of
codifications, from which one might pick and choose a set which matches one's taste.
And taste is, of course, something with which you must not take dispute. So before I depart from this
opinionated discourse, I will warn that you, the practicing musician, must know the tastes of your
audience, and be prepared to please them. If this means that you must also educate them, so that their
tastes will match what is historically correct, you will always do better by cajoling and caressing, than
by haranguing and lecturing.
With all that out of the way, let me quote Apel's rules for musica ficta, and then present other more
recent rules as I am able to find them:
The B is natural when occurring in conjunct motion (seconds) from both sides, but is flat when it is
connected by a leap with either the preceding or the following note. The B occurring as a top-tone is
flat.
While these two rules may seem wholey incomplete when compared to the great corpus of existing
works (let alone that body of works which have not come down to the present day, they do a fair job
of providing a guideline for deciding musica ficta `on the fly', and without recourse to the other parts.
Prevailing thought (at least the conjecture that appeals most to me) is that music making was not done
in a vacuum, and thus a composer or highly-trained musician would have been present at the practice
sessions of any piece of music, and that this professional would instruct the others as to how to modify
which notes according to what seems best to him. This proceedure, while robbing posterity of an easy
rule for determining when to apply musica ficta, would be quite practical, and while looking `kludgy' to
us, would provide years of good service!