
By Esther Criscuola de Laix
The phrase musica ficta (literally, “fictitious music,” “false music”) comes up in almost every critical edition of medieval or renaissance music ever published. Originally, the term referred to notes that did not fit within the hexachordal system devised by Guido d’Arezzo in the eleventh century and used as the standard music-theoretical system in Western Europe for almost six centuries following (see example 1 for the famous Guidonian hand diagram, with a note at each joint). In contrast, notes that did fit within the system were called musica recta (“right music,” “correct music”). Before the late sixteenth century, these altered pitches were not always expressly notated in written music, and applying them was often a matter of musical custom or of aural and oral practice. When they were notated, however, it was with the signs that we nowadays would call accidentals—and this is, indeed, exactly how our modern sharp and flat signs got their start.[1]
Example 1. Guidonian hand from a late-fifteenth-century Mantuan manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Liturg. 216, fol. 168r). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Musical customs change, however, and what was the “aural and oral practice” of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is not that of today. Thus, when modern-day editors of medieval and early modern music use the term musica ficta, it is specifically to refer to the means and practices of translating into notation the altered pitches that were not expressly notated in written music—the ones early performers would have applied on their own initiative, but which might not automatically occur to modern performers. Fortunately, thanks to the writings of music theorists of past centuries,[2] we know most of the basic rules early performers would have followed in deciding when to alter musica recta into musica ficta. Many of those rules—which I summarize below—form the basis for how those alterations are handled in early music editions today, and certain conventions have arisen for notating them—the most obvious one being the notation of musica ficta alterations with small accidental symbols placed above the staff (see example 2).
Example 2. Anonymous, “Rossignolet, connais-tu point m’amie?” (mm. 53–57), from Canzoni francese libro primo: Ottaviano Scotto’s 1535 Collection of Twenty-Three Chansons for Four Voices, ed. Paul Walker (R170).
As with any musical or aesthetic choice, there is a great deal of subjectivity that goes into decisions about which pitches to alter as musica ficta, and different scholars, editors, publishers, and even performers have taken various approaches to this topic over the years. What follows here is a summary of A-R’s house style and recommended practices for notating musica ficta alterations in editions of early music, which hopefully will shed some light on this sometimes complicated and often confusing topic.
What Is and What Isn’t Ficta
Perhaps the first step in understanding how to notate musica ficta appropriately is to understand what it is and what it isn’t. Once again, we at A-R use the term musica ficta to refer to the chromatic pitch alterations not specified in written or printed sources but intended to be added in performance according to the theoretical and aural/oral rules of the period. (More on those below.) We indicate such alterations using small-sized accidentals above the staff, as shown in example 2 above. Each note that is to be altered gets its own small accidental, even when the same pitch requires alteration within the same measure (example 3).
Example 3. Hermann Matthias Werrecore, “Sana me domine” (mm. 6–11), from Cantuum quinque vocum quos motetta vocant . . . liber primus (1559), ed. Christine Suzanne Getz (R151).
Unlike modern accidentals placed on the staff beside a note, musica ficta accidentals do not carry through the measure. Thus, in example 4, in the superius voice at measure 25 and the altus voice at measure 27, the second G is sung as G♮; the sharp above the earlier G has no effect on it.
Example 4. Anonymous, “Rossignolet, connais-tu point m’amie?” (mm. 24–28), from Canzoni francese libro primo: Ottaviano Scotto’s 1535 Collection of Twenty-Three Chansons for Four Voices, ed. Paul Walker (R170).
We do not use either this form of notation, or the term musica ficta, to refer to
- accidental signs added by the editor because they are necessary in modern music typesetting practice (e.g., those on pitches repeated across an editorially added barline, or cancellations of inflections made earlier within the same measure); or
- cautionary accidentals added by the editor (e.g., for clarifying cross-relations between parts, chromatic motion across a barline, and similar).
In those cases, editorial accidentals are notated within the staff—within square brackets in case 1, within parentheses in case 2. These accidentals follow modern rules for duration (i.e., they last through the remainder of the measure). For more about them, along with numerous examples, see our previous articles Purposeful Accidentals and A Guide to Cautionary Accidentals.
Why Add Ficta?
What were the rules and customs medieval and renaissance performers followed in applying pitch inflections? It was a subjective art then as now, and various early theorists (on whom we must rely in the absence of sound recordings!) have various takes on the subject. Still, there were some areas of consensus that form the basis for the guidelines recommended by A-R and used by many scholars and editors today. I will summarize them here, which I hope will be helpful to modern-day editors looking to deploy musica ficta alterations in an idiomatic manner.
Reasons for adding musica ficta alterations can be classed into two main categories: causa necessitatis (“for necessity’s sake”) and causa pulchritudinis (“for beauty’s sake”). The causa necessitatis category is concerned primarily with avoiding or softening dissonances, the most serious of which in the hexachordal system result when perfect consonances (unison, octave, fourth, or fifth) become imperfected—that is, augmented or diminished, either vertically (i.e., harmonically) or melodically (i.e., successively, as a melodic cross-relation). All such dissonances can be conceptualized in the hexachordal system as clashes between a mi note and a fa note—namely, the two degrees that form the semitone in the middle of a hexachord—and were considered the original “devil in music”: “mi contra fa,” the old saying went, “est diabolus in musica.”[3] A musica ficta accidental would thus be added to transform a mi-fa clash into a perfect consonance (see examples 5 and 6).
Example 5. Hermann Matthias Werrecore, “Haec dies” (mm. 111–14), from Cantuum quinque vocum quos motetta vocant . . . liber primus (1559), ed. Christine Suzanne Getz (R151). In mm. 113–14, the ficta flats in the tenor and bassus avoid both harmonic and melodic cross-relations—in this case, augmented and diminished octaves—with the explicitly notated B♭s in the passage.
Example 6. Orlando di Lasso, “Quod licet id libeat” (mm. 30–35), from The Complete Motets 21: Motets for Three to Twelve Voices from “Magnim Opus Musicum” (Munich, 1604), ed. Peter Bergquist (R148). In m. 33, the ficta flat in the cantus voice is added to avoid a tritone leap from the preceding f'.
Related to this is the rule “una nota super la semper est canendum fa”: that is, one note above la—the uppermost note of a hexachord—is always to be sung as fa (that is, as a semitone rather than a whole tone above). This rule arises from the fact that note one note above the uppermost note of the C and F hexachords—B above A and E above D, respectively—form a tritone with the fa degree of the hexachord (F in the C hexachord, B♭ in the F hexachord) unless they are flattened. Once again, then, it is a matter of perfecting an imperfect consonance (this time a theoretical, horizontal one), and it is thus customary to add a musica ficta flat to these notes when they appear directly above to their respective la notes (see example 7 below and the bass line in example 2 above).
Example 7. Jean Mouton, “Sancte Sebastiane” (mm. 1–5), from Songs in Times of Plague, ed. Remi Chiu (R172).
The class of musica ficta accidentals added causa pulchritudinis—“for beauty’s sake”—are added not to avoid dissonances but to enhance consonances. To early theorists, that often meant expanding an imperfect consonance (a third or sixth) to be as close as possible to the nearest perfect consonance, especially at a cadence, thus enhancing the arrival on the perfect consonance.
The basic cadence in premodern and early modern music was considered the expansion of a sixth outward to a perfect octave—usually between a superius part and a tenor part, usually ornamented by a suspension in the superius part. To bring that sixth as close as possible to that octave, then, could mean making it a major sixth by raising its upper note. Even once it became customary to surround such cadences with other harmonies (notably a bass line, resulting in the now-familiar “dominant–tonic” sonority), that basic structure remained. In that case, “enhancing the cadential harmony” means, in practice, raising the leading tone (see the superius voice in example 2 above).
Such cadential suspensions are often ornamented with a lower neighbor figure, in which case it is customary to raise the neighbor note in order to avoid a melodic augmented second (see example 3 above, where such a figure can be seen in the uppermost voice in measure 8).
As a corollary, it is customary in most cases to raise the third of the final chord of a piece or section of a piece to be major (the so-called tierce de Picardie, or Picardy third)—an alteration made, once again, in the interest of approaching perfection.[4] Although the Picardy third was usually explicitly notated, even in early sources, it occasionally is not (see the ending shown in example 8, from a madrigal first published in 1560).
Example 8. Alessandro Striggio, “Ardendo i’ grid’e moro” (mm. 80–86), Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci, ed. David S. Butchart (R143).
Later Repertories
These basic rules for inflections remained in force into the early seventeenth century, though in the later decades of the sixteenth it became increasingly common to notate them explicitly. Even then, though, some inflections do seem to have been left to performers. In examples 9 and 10, from a Magnificat setting published in Salamanca in 1607, note the juxtaposition of source-notated and implied accidentals, both at a sectional cadence and in an instance of “fa super la.”
Example 9. Sebastián de Vivanco, “Magnificat primi toni sex vocibus (Anima mea)” (mm. 13–16), from Liber magnificarum (1607), ed. Michael Noone and Graeme Skinner (R173).
Example 10. Sebastián de Vivanco, “Magnificat primi toni sex vocibus (Anima mea)” (mm. 109–13), from Liber magnificarum (1607), ed. Michael Noone and Graeme Skinner (R173).
In repertories of this later period, the question of whether to add musica ficta alterations often must be considered on a case-by-case basis depending on the nature of the source and the way it handles accidentals. In the case of polyphonic music accompanied by basso continuo, however, A-R generally recommends against using ficta accidentals and requires that all editorially added accidentals be placed in the staff rather than above the notes as ficta. One reason is to avoid visual confusion, as continuo figures also involve small accidentals placed above the staff. But also, by the period when basso continuo becomes prevalent, the reasoning behind editorially added pitch inflections can often be explained in terms other than hexachordal theory (e.g., to match the harmony called for in the basso continuo figures and/or another part; see example 11, measure 47, where a natural sign needed to be added to the b' in the first choir’s cantus 2 part).
Example 11. Martin Roth, “Singet dem Herren” (mm. 45–47), from Complete Motets from “Florilegium Portense,” ed. L. Frederick Jodry V (B218).
Exceptions and Ambiguities
Exceptions, ambiguities, and extreme cases always arise, of course—and sometimes they are written in by the composers themselves. In example 12, showing the final measures of an eight-voice motet first published in 1570, note the Es in various voice parts that are circled in red. Those in the altus 1 part are inflected with sharp signs in the source—redundant by modern standards given that there is no E♭ in the key signature (and note that those signs are not being retained in this score), but necessary from a hexachordal standpoint, as they signal that these Es should be sung as mi instead of fa super la. Because of this, the Es in measures 80–81 of the bassus 2 part do not receive the (perhaps expected) ficta flat inflections, in order to avoid a cross-relation with the altus 1 part. But it also suggests that the flat that the source gives to the cantus 2 part’s E in measure 80—perhaps by a compositor expecting a fa super la figure—is probably an error. (Indeed, if you look hard, you may be able to see the penciled-in-but-erased flat beside this note, whose removal is noted in the critical notes that go along with this edition).
Example 12. Gallus Dressler, “Ecce quam bonum” (mm. 78–83), from Gallus Dressler, Complete Latin Motets, ed. Robert Forgács (forthcoming).
In other cases, a too-strict editorial application of ficta according to the principles described above can have results bordering on the bizarre—which may or may not be by the composer’s design (see example 13, from a piece published 1553 and featuring ficta double-flats).[5]
Example 13. Matthias Greiter, “Passibus ambiguis” (mm. 86–96), from Fortuna desperata: Thirty-Six Settings of an Italian Song, ed. Honey Meconi (M037).
These examples might make us wonder if the principles of musica ficta might be, in the immortal words of Captain Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean, “more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.” But even if so, they at least make for a solid starting point. As with any tricky editorial issue, feel free to consult your house editor or another member of the A-R editorial staff if you have questions about specific cases.
Esther Criscuola de Laix is a house editor with A-R Editions.
[1] As an example: In the Guidonian system, whose hexachordal units were based on C, F, and G, the note F functioned either as ut (the first of the six hexachord syllables) in the F hexachord based on F, or as fa (the fourth hexachord syllable, occurring after the central semitone) in the C hexachord. Thus, the note F fa ut was considered part of musica recta. But since there was no hexachord that included an F functioning as, say, mi (the third hexachordal syllable, preceding the central semitone), the note F mi stood outside the hexachordal system, and was thus part of musica ficta. (In written notation, F mi would be rendered as an F with a ♯ or similar sign beside it—and, indeed, the original meaning of the symbol ♯ is, essentially, “make this note mi.”) For a detailed breakdown of the hexachordal system, see Robert Donington, The Interpretation of Early Music (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 125–27.
[2] Who—don’t forget—were codifying existing practices rather than prescribing new ones!
[3] For more on mi contra fa clashes, see Donington, Interpretation, 138–39.
[4] Although the third counts as an imperfect consonance (and thus not technically available in “perfect” form), the major third would probably have been understood as closer to perfection than the minor third for purely sonic reasons: the major third, as the fifth partial of the overtone series, is more acoustically stable than the minor third (which is the nineteenth partial). It is also notable that some editions of polyphony from the early Renaissance—especially that of Josquin and his generation—do not always apply the Picardy third in final chords.
[5] Honey Meconi, ed., Fortuna desperata: Thirty-Six Settings of an Italian Song (Middleton, Wis.: A-R Editions, 2001; M037), 182, notes: “Regardless of how these flats are interpreted, there is little difference in the resulting sound, as the music moves inexorably around the circle of fifths.” The original and classic discussion of the piece is Edward E. Lowinsky, “Matthaeus [sic] Greiter’s Fortuna: An Experiment in Chromaticism and in Musical Iconography,” pt. 1, Musical Quarterly 42, no 4 (1556): 500–519; and pt. 2, Musical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1957): 68–85, https://www.jstor.org/stable/740258 and https://www.jstor.org/stable/740384, which situates the piece within Lowinsky’s posited “secret chromatic art.”