Music & Letters, Vol. 86 No.
1, Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved
CORRESPONDENCE
To the Editors of Music & Letters
DIATONIC FICTA
May I reply briefly to some of the points raised
by Roger Wibberleys response to my letter
about his review of Margaret Bents Counterpoint,
Composition, and Musica Ficta (reviewed in Music &
Letters, 84 (2003), 4738; correspondence in vol.
85 (2004), 51116)? First, I plead guilty to mak-
ing dogmatic assertions. My remark about the
relevance of scale-structures to actual melodic
conduct (which included the important qualifica-
tion necessarily) was based on my own know-
ledge, such as it is, of plainchant and polyphonic
repertories. There will be (and are) instances of
conscious adherence to such structures, but in
my view they represent an artificial accommoda-
tion to them rather than a reflection of their pur-
pose. While I would be the first to agree that a
full discussion of medieval tetrachordal scales
would need to be considerably more nuanced
than this, it seems to be plain fact that most
chant melodies float freely within them; and
while a hexachord will inevitably accommodate
more melodies within its boundaries than a tetra-
chord I cannot see that the influence of the sys-
tem on melodic conduct was ever more than
peripherala word I use to describe the relative
frequency of such influence, not the intrinsic
interest of its occurrences.
Regarding Morleys comments about specula-
tive music (in the Annotations to his treatise), I
should have thought they confirmed my view.
Gaffurius, I agree, used the word chromatic
freely to describe non-recta notes, not only in the
passage cited by Wibberley but also in the
Musica ficta chapter of his Musica Practica. So
might we regard the sharpened sixth and seventh
of a minor scale, or the use of accidentals to
effect a modulation, as chromaticisms; but com-
mon sense tells us that they are not. Whether
music is chromatic or not (unless it is an artificial
re-creation of ancient chromaticism) is partly a
matter of individual judgement, since it depends
on the extent to which the hearer perceives a
connection between chromatic intervals separated
by other, non-chromatic ones, or that occur else-
161
where in the harmony. In any case, music that
can be described as chromatic is unlikely to be so
for the whole of the time.
But scale-structures are not the same thing as
the music to which they may be accommodated.
Hexachords are diatonic in their very nature; like
the tetrachords inherited from ancient or (it is
supposed) medieval Greek theory, with the
exception of those of the ancient chromatic and
enharmonic genera, they contain only the inter-
vals of the Pythagorean diatonic scale. The chal-
lenge set by Wibberleys hypothetical example is
easily met. All the intervals in it are diatonic. All
its notes are present in Prosdocimus third fic-
tive monochord with no suggestion on his part
that they are chromatic notes. Whether the
resulting melody is diatonic or not is not the
question raised by the use of such terms in the
Middle Ages and Renaissance: the question is,
precisely, what it is about such melodies that can
be revealed by intervallic analysis. In Prosdo-
cimus examples of musica ficta, though they may
be loosely thought of as chromatic, all the direct
intervallic relations are diatonic, and for that rea-
son the concept of chromaticism simply does not
arise.
I related my comments to editorial acciden-
tals only because Wibberleys example from Jos-
quin involved a proposed editorial solution to a
perceived dilemma. I agree entirely that the
issue is the status of musica ficta as such. I also
agree that the expression diatonic ficta is a ple-
onasm (I am happy to take ficta as a noun in
such a context), but its very useful purpose when
coined was to correct a widespread lack of preci-
sion in the use of the word chromatic. The real
question is whether the concept of musica ficta
has any place outside a diatonic understanding
of musical structure. I cannot see that it does.
The problem would ariseand may have arisen
earlier than I had realizedwhen through a
renewed interest in ancient theory, a genuine
concept of chromaticism emerged. This was
bound to blur the status of accidentals, and the
exercise of distinguishing their functions would
have been a fruitless task. For one thing, the
same accidental might have both a diatonic and
a chromatic function. One solution was indeed
to regard all notes outside the regular hexa-
chords as chromatic, whatever the context. But
that runs entirely counter to the previous under-
standing of what musica ficta actually was: an
opposition to musica vera and nothing at all to do
with the chromatic genus. We ought surely to
recognize the intrinsic diatonicism of musica ficta
and allow sixteenth-century (or late fifteenth-
century) pragmatism to run its coursea prag-
matism long anticipated, indeed, in keyboard
notations and tuning-systems from the four-
teenth century onwards.
More dogmatism, Im afraid. But I hope it
makes plain my position on this issue, even if it
does not convince my old friend.
JOHN CALDWELL
doi:10.1093/ml/gci026
Faculty of Music
St Aldates
Oxford OX1 1DB
RECIPIENTS OF MUSIC
& LETTERS AWARDS
The Editorial Board has made grants to the follow-
ing towards costs in connection with the projects
indicated: Paul Attinello towards expenses of
keynote speakers at the RMA Research Students
Conference, University of Newcastle upon Tyne,
March 2005; Jeremy Barham towards transla-
tion costs of contributions to The Cambridge Com-
panion to Mahler (2005); Pauline Fairclough for
reproduction fees for music examples in a book
on Shostakovichs Fourth Symphony; Nicholas
Reyland for Travel expenses to present a paper
at the Symposium of the International Musico-
logical Society, Melbourne, 2004; Matthew
Riley for travel expenses to present a paper at the
Inaugural Conference of the North American
British Music Studies Association, June 2004;
Konstantinos Terzopoulos for travel expenses to
present a paper at the IMS Study Group Cantus
Planus, Lillafred, Hungary, August 2004; Naomi
Waltham-Smith for travel expenses to present a
paper at the conference on Music and Language,
Aberdeen, June 2004.

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