Musica Ficta: Ruminations when Music History seems to Fail us

It is one thing to write about history as a historian, and another to write about music history as a musicologist. As a corollary to the actual performance of music, musicology is sometimes seen as performance’s little brother, busying in the field of history, getting the details “precisely right”, so that musicians can “do their thing” without fear of offending a properly “historical” rendition of a non-contemporary work of music. The scrupulous archival empiricism of medieval musicologists, in particular, may be pivotal in determining the fate of a single work. If a piece of music is discovered to be wrongly attributed, the work may drop out of repertory entirely. On the other hand, the excitement of discovering a new attribution may propel a piece from forgotten history into the forefront of performance, analysis and discussion. Similarly, close historical analyses revealing clues about performance practice have instigated an entire industry of “historically-informed” performances, perhaps (mis)construing other performative interpretations as lesser or uninformed. “Authenticity” (at least prior to the ‘80s) was a shiny badge to be worn with pride, a step up the ladder of teleological positivism, a beacon of a commitment to knowledge which casts a long shadow over performers and musicians who fail to step into its dazzling terrain. Or, as Joseph Kerman put it, a “baleful term which has caused endless acrimony” for it “resonates with unearned good vibrations”.[1]

Of course, debates in the 1980s over authenticity in music have concluded that such figments of accuracy are but pipe dreams, remnants of the great 19th century Hegelian progress-myth enabling us to approximate “truth” tangentially.[2] “Authenticity” has become a dirty-word, embarrassingly replaced by the benign term “historically informed”, denoting a principled system of musical production rather than a commitment to any single, latent historical truth.[3] The infamous listening experiment in which musicologist Daniel Leech-Wilkinson paired “authentistic” recordings with those that were not led him to declare that in every case,

“[The] stylistic contrast between the earlier and the “authentic” performance is essentially the same. [...] In a nutshell, the difference is that between performer as “interpreter” and performer as “transmitter” [...] The remarkable uniformity of approach which dominates early music performance … is nothing more than a reflection of current taste”.[4]

Richard Taruskin chimes in on the anti-authenticity camp with characteristic wit and insight, claiming that “It is the latter [historically “authentic” performances] that is truly modern performance … while the former [“modern” performance] represents the progressively weakening survival of an earlier style, inherited from the nineteenth century, one that is fast becoming historical”.[5] Attempting to sum up the difficulties involved in the “veneer” of historicism through the debates,[6] Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell remark that “Early music as a concept is surely beginning to be eroded, as period principles begin to be applied to mainstream situations”,[7] attesting to the force of modern-day music reproduction technologies such as CDs, mp3s and I-pods to restructure entire social and international networks of listening.[8] I do not wish to resurface many of the torturous and complicated arguments in this paper, but to convey a sense of how such conceptual preoccupations are still “live” theoretical materials, weighing heavily upon scholars who plumb the depths of the “historical” for information which may impact the reception or performance of a particular “work”.

No musicologist today claims that we can ever accurately reconstruct the proper epistemological conditions by which to “accurately” listen to music. No amount of historical clothing, historical instruments or site-specific re-enactments can ever magically open an experiential hatch into a world long lost. Such “veneers” we erect over a systematic process of scholastic appraisal or disproval cannot be taken as properly “historical” in-and-of-itself. The paradox of “live” performance and recordings is that while it gestures towards a sort of “presencing” of (the music of) the past, it is inevitably mediated through written, textual documents – blueprints for realization – not to mention intermediate stages of editing, transcribing and documents regarding period-specific performance practices. As Rick Altman has brilliantly demonstrated, our formalised “codes of listening” and “codes of representation” are themselves subject to historical change;[9] even Lydia Goehr’s biting critique of the “work concept” in musical ontology has accused modern listeners of “conceptual imperialism”, superimposing today’s codes of listening and presentation upon the music of the past.[10] In this sense, the present day concert-hall performance situation appearing to deliver a sense of aural immediacy is itself a fantasy of unmediated listening access to a sonorous past. Here, the “experience” of live music drawn from historical sources cannot and should not present itself as a doorway into some hidden kernel of the past. As Taruskin suggests, one should be critically aware of “historical” performance as modern forms of “historicism” which “clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time”.[11]

In light of recent discourses over the problem of the photograph composing a form of historical “presence”, one could conceivably gesture towards forms of musical recording as an analogue of the photograph’s trace-like “indexicality” criterion. This may argument may be pertinent to recorded pieces of the late 19th and 20th Century, indeed serving as indispensible audio-documents concerning performance practice.[12] But what happens when such recordings do not exist? For medieval musicologists, the significant absence of an audible evidence to test their hypothesis leaves a gaping hole in the history of early music; without recourse to such sources, musicologists have tended to foreground text to offer insights into the realization of early scores. “The sound of modern performances and recordings may beckon us into the realm of early music,” says Margaret Bent, “but it is only when we recognize performance sound to be a modern construction … that we may penetrate beyond it, to the intrinsic content of the music independently of the performance, and learn new ways of listening to unfamiliar [early] music styles” (My emphasis).[13]

For Bent, a corresponding gateway into appreciating early music is dispensing with the interpretive gesture of performance (the variable) and focussing on the score (the invariable), suggesting that abstract, “intrinsic” musical form can be separated from timbral content. There is, however, the danger that attempting to “penetrate beyond” the mediated sound-world of performances to the “intrinsic content of the music” risks simply replacing the interpretive liberties of performance with an assumedly more historically-filial object – namely, medieval source documents themselves such as treatises, scores and manuscripts. In other words, the mode of “presence” is shifted from the sonic immediacy of “performance” to the sphere of the “textual”, bestowing source documents with a quasi-religious aura not unlike the seductive call of “authenticity”.[14] As Harry White points out, such musicological preoccupations “with the textual integrity of contemporary [early music] performance [becomes] an expression par excellence of the regulative force of [Lydia Goehr’s] work-concept”,[15] leaving us trapped in a reductive circuit which accepts no more than the aura of the textual as a metaphysical substitute for “authenticity”.

Bent goes further, claiming that a more fruitful musicological endeavour should involve restricting our gaze to the determinable, quantifiable elements in the score. By tweaking our musicological proclivities to produce “knowledge of the music” rather than “knowledge about the music”,[16] she seems to suggest that we can somehow recover a historically shared “grammar” of early music, bolstered by fastidious historical citation:

“A methodology cannot be sensitive to the particular language of pretonal music unless that language was taken into account in formulating the analytical method – in which case it would indeed be to some extent a historically sensitive method. The task is to reconstruct, as precisely as possible in the absence of native witnesses, the languages, grammars and dialects proper to specific repertories, as we would in dealing with their verbal counterparts, if we aspire not a ventriloquized monologue but a true dialogue”.[17]

The task of constructing “as precisely as possible” the “languages, grammars and dialects” most pertinent to the repertory analysed, Bent seems to argue, would be to fashion our analytical tools out of historically valid “premises”. These “languages” are “fundamentals … essential to correct interpretation of the music as is knowledge of sexagesimal calculation to understanding early astronomy”,[18] fundamentals which will allow savvy musicologists (painting by Bent’s numbers) to distinguish “between notes that are clearly right and notes that are clearly wrong”.[19] Bent means serious business, lashing out strongly against the “barbarisms” of wrong notes which still prevail in scholarly editions of composers such as Guillaume de Machaut. Putting aside the defensive self-righteousness of Bent’s positivism,[20] the danger is that we risk homogenizing a notion of “the Music” with a capital M, by privileging the textual authority of the “score”, thereby foreclosing the possibility that each surviving version of “the Music” may constitute a very different ontology in relation to its textual vehicle.[21] Furthermore, this universalizing view of Music works to reinforce the idea of an “original” distinguishable from disagreeing sources by scribal error and corruption along the disseminating chain; deeply Platonic in its conviction that proper historical work will reveal an essential, uncorrupted originating source,[22] or even the “perfect language”.[23] The problem is the movement from the particular (the individual manuscript source) to the general (historical concepts about music) – how can we fashion historically appropriate hermeneutic tools without subscribing to a “one-size-fits-all” ontology of early music?

In these cases of complexity where the historical-empiricist approach seems to work too well, perhaps we should take a step back and consider the cases where music history fails us, where the cherished goals of tedious archaeological research disable instead of en-able the production of “historically-informed” music. By doing so, we become more aware of the points of contact between historical musicology and the “historicism” promised by early music performance practice, a shared-space where a choice is demanded of the performer/musicologist: to enact a form of radical reverence to some fantastical notion of an authentically recoverable past and to cease performance altogether, or to perform in spite of historical uncertainty, acknowledging the pitfalls of the unknowable, while at the same time celebrating the agency of the performer as a creative co-collaborator in the production of music, rescuing historical interpretation as a necessarily creative endeavour rather than a scrupulous (not to mention impossible) iteration of a past always and already lost.

Such an example is the notoriously tedious phenomenon of musica ficta or falsa (fictitious or false music). Ficta may be crudely paralleled to a modern-day version of accidentals in music – that is, sharps or flats, which were used since the 12th Century to denote an alteration of an interval. A signa durum which would equate to today’s “natural” sign indicated the augmentation of an adjacent pitch dyad by a semitone. The signa durum denoted both the “natural” and the “sharp” sign, indicating to the singer to raise the written pitch accordingly. Similarly, the signa molle (or what we call the “flat” sign today) would signal a corresponding lowering of pitch. The origins of such signs, however, did not presuppose a democratic pitch-set of 12 chromatic tones. In addition to the Church system of modes (groups of scales organized by stepwise patterns), the Guidonian Hexachord quickly became a popular pedagogical tool for navigating pretonal space in the 9th Century, later taken to be a prominent feature of diatonic pitch-space by the 13th Century.[24] The Hexachordal system of pitch-navigation was initially developed by Guido of Arezzo, who sought to reduce errors in the singing of plainchant by cantors who sang incorrect intervals. In a nutshell, the Hexachord is a portable gamut of six pitches arranged on the letter notation (claves) of the properly divided monochoral scale:[25]



Each hexachord consists of five solmisation syllables ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la, the medieval predecessors of our familiar “do-re-mi” scale. The intervals between ut-re, re-mi, fa-sol and sol-la were fixed at a whole tone, while the only semitone in the Guidonian hexachord was the interval between mi-fa. When several of these hexachords are superimposed upon the claves, it allows the cantor to navigate the pitch-space of the claves, keeping the position of the mi-fa semitone intact to the particular context which the hexachord is situated. The “natural” hexachord (naturale) maps the ut of the hexachord onto C clave (indicated as C-ut). The “hard” hexachord (durum) maps ut onto Gamma Γ (Γ-ut), rendering B-mi as b-durum (or b-natural) to preserve the intervallic integrity of a semitone between B-mi and C-fa. Likewise, the “soft” hexachord (molle) maps ut onto F (F-ut): because B-C claves of the monochord correspond to fa-sol on the hexachord (an interval of a whole tone), the B is flattened into b-molle and given a signa molle (flat sign). By doing so, this also preserves the mi-fa semitone by mapping directly onto A-B-molle. Because the naturale, durum and molle hexachords all overlap each other by a series of claves, the singer can navigate the pitch-space of the claves by switching from one hexachord to another through a shared note. To give an example, if the cantor were on the Γ-ut durum hexachord (the first vertical hexachord on the left in the diagram) and wanted to sing a G clave, he would have to effect a hexachordal mutation from the Γ-ut hexachord to the C-ut naturale hexachord by singing ut on C-fa, re on D-sol or mi on E-la (see the boxed space in the figure above). What is important to note is that the signa durum and molle do not indicate local pitch-changes in the context of the claves; the signa serves to draw attention to a change in the position of solmisation syllables mi-fa in relation to the claves, hence signalling a hexachordal mutation. Signa durum and molle denote the proprietas (property) of the new hexachord one mutates to without affecting the intrinsic proprietas of individual claves.

Two-dimensional systems of overlapping hexachords were frequently presented in a visual schema called the Guidonian hand, where each step in the claves corresponded to a notch on the bare hand.[26] For novice singers, this mental schema could be embodied, indeed grafted onto their own bodies – students could visually navigate the mutation of hexachords through paired solmisation syllables using their hands as visual references (See diagram above).[27] The system of overlapping hexachords contained by the Guidonian hand also set epistemological limits to the apperception of pre-tonal space. The pitch-boundaries delimited by the hand was called musica vera, recta or regularis (true, right or regular music), since they reflected the “regular” hexachoral mapping over the letter claves.[28] Musica ficta, on the other hand, refers to intervals that lay “outside” the Guidonian hand which were not found on the regular letter claves. Amongst other reasons, musica ficta was theorized in to accommodate an increasing amount of chromaticism, regulating them under a common mnemonic system.[29]



If a composer wanted to indicate a singer to sing a C-durum (C-sharp), for example, the singer would have to draw the C-durum from a hexachord not found on the Guidonian Hand. Since applying a signa durum on C implies that it takes on a C-mi solmisation, the theoretical implication would be to “borrow” the C-mi from an A-ut hexachord, which is alien to the musica recta designations on the Guidonian hand. The A-ut hexachord is thus “feigned” or “fictitious” in relation to musica recta, contrived to fill in the composer’s demands for musical chromaticism. The problem is that numerous musica ficta in polyphonic compositions were un-notated; composers usually relied on a singer’s understandings of the performance practices of the day to inflect such notes with ficta.[30] Burdened by a lack of clear theoretical evidence by a scarcity of historical treatises, one can understand the difficulties of editing late medieval music. As Bent relates:

“A twofold dilemma faces the editor of early music when he comes to supply accidentals. Firstly, he has insufficient evidence on which to base a definitive solution but must nonetheless specify what is to be performed; and secondly, such evidence as he does have appears to embody a conflict between the testimony of theorists and the evidence of manuscript accidentals”.[31]

While Bent presents a “working hypothesis” to guide the editing of old manuscripts for performance purposes, her “hypothesis” does not eliminate the degree of uncertainty to which editors should fill-in implied ficta. Some theorists such as Elizabeth Leach propose a radical ficta-cization of “directed progressions” – conspicuous cadence features in polyphonic music.[32] Others, such as Thomas Brothers, advocate a less totalitarian approach to ficta applications, reinterpreting musica ficta based on “the expressive potential of accidentals rather than … a topic for performance practice”.[33] Brothers takes Anonymous 2’s depiction of ficta as causa neccesitatis (reason of necessity) and causa pulchritudinis (reason of beauty) at his word, arguing that “necessity” referred to the avoidance of contrapuntally occurring tritones, leaving space for chromatic experimentation (hence “beauty”) where compositions did not violate the tritone principle. This leads Brothers to uncertain ground where he reads ficta as “digressions” from the Guidonian space of recta hexachords, suggesting that “the possibility that the manuscript evidence can be taken at face value”, dispensing entirely with the “performance practice” haggle.[34] Perhaps entertaining such “possibilities” may be a welcome gesture in the discipline of musicology, which has seen earlier 19th Century theorists such as Hugo Riemann, who edited ficta markings to reflect contemporaneous understandings of tonality.[35] More recently, Thomas Christenson has unearthed the politics of ficta editorial decisions in early 17th Century France between opposing camps expressing diverging attitudes towards “modern” tonality.[36]

What this little excursus reveals is the problems inherent in the project of medieval musicological archaeology when the sources refuse to speak back on clear, equal terms to their scholastic interlocutors. Conceivably, performers and analysts could wish to ignore musica ficta entirely in their assessment of the pieces, although this is to historically reject an oral tradition which has shaped the pitch and melodic contours of medieval song; in counterpoint, this may invariably lead to glaring tritones and mi-contra-fa violations.[37] The failure of the musicological project to shed certain light upon the proper inflection of musica ficta is today reflected in the sheepish editorial markings of suggested ficta, with accidentals notated above the note rather than on the same staff line prior to the note (as conventionally indicated today). For performers, ficta uncertainty may offer a liberating opportunity for creativity and interpretation, although it spells despair for the musicologist. Ficta uncertainty opens up a gap between the “historicism” desired from the musicologist and the “historicism” demanded by the fantasy of “historically-informed” performance practice, a clear-and-present “absence” that haunts our reception of the score-trace.

This ficta ghost which comes back periodically to haunt the insufficiencies of modern transcriptions threatens to pull the thread, completely unravelling our epistemologically sound hammock of the “work-concept”. In such cases, giving up (to) the ghost could mean abandoning the editorial project altogether – indeed refusing to perform based on the conviction that “historically-informed” performances demand a degree of textual authenticity and accuracy, a conviction that is itself “fictitious” and illusory in the first place. In such cases the ficta ghost of absence terrifies the petrified musicologist/performer to inaction, and frazzled retreat. For a few philosophers of history following Derrida’s “Hauntology”,[38] however, grappling with history’s blind-spots through the uncanny experience of the ghost may be an enabling function rather than disabling. This “blind spot” has been theorized in a number of fields as a vortex which resists our scholarly, analytic gazes: Roland Barthes’s photographic “punctum”,[39] Michael Fried’s “anti-theatricalism”[40] and the “stain” of the Lacanian Real as interpreted by Slavoj Žižek’.[41] This “stain” on the canvas of historical knowledge that reminds us its failure to comply with our rules is but a feature of our own epistemological horizons, a condition of perspectival blindness on our part that makes the project of history possible (and valuable) in the first place.

Rather than recoil from the field of the vortex that threatens to render meaningless the historical project of musica ficta, the “spectre” of the past “returns to remind us that the past is incomplete and therefore to come”.[42] In this way, the spectre of ficta-absence gestures towards the future, opening up possibilities for renewal, renovation and imaginative innovation not so much in spite of absence, but in the face of absence-as-presence:

“It is a proper characteristic of the spectre, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future … A phantom never dies, it remains always to come and to come back … The thinking of the spectre … contrary to what good sense leads us to believe, signals toward the future”.[43]

In the case of ficta, the spectral absence of certainty allows us to be open towards possibilities for coming to terms with a past irretrievably lost through ingenuity and invention. When one historical method fails us, surely this must not hamper our efforts to productively deal with mysterious historical traces – methodological failure should compel us to whittle new hermeneutic tools with creativity and imagination, not to mention inventing transcriptive tools to enable the sounding of these blueprint-like traces. While we may not be able to fully disengage ourselves from the epistemological confines of the “work-concept”, two alternatives come to mind. Firstly, we may concede to the intrinsic limitations of the “work-concept” warts-and-all. The “work-concept”, as Goehr attests, is also a “regulative concept”, one that helps to define the position of music (and musicology) and productively discipline the contours of “musicking”[44] without falling into the bleak, deconstructive relativism of Leech-Wilkinson’s tautological dictum: “musicology is whatever musicologists do as musicologists”.[45] Goehr explains:

“Regulative concepts … provide the rules of the game … [guiding] the practice externally by indicating the point of following the constitutive rules. [They] do not make up the structure of the practice; rather, in their interrelations, they determine what the structure should be like. In their normative function, regulative concepts determine, stabilize, and order the structure of practices”.[46]

To put it another way, the “regulative” rule-bestowing function of the “work-concept” confers meaning upon the spectrum of musical activities under its wing. It justifies the production of music-as-works by accepting that there is no prior, “purer” historical frame of reference by which we can relate to these early pieces of music. Ficta decisions today may not necessarily be made in relation to the 17th Century teleological-leanings of Joseph Fétis’ tonalité moderne, Edmond Coussemaker or the anti-moderne Joseph d’Ortigue,[47] but this is neither to assert that the hypothesizing of Bent, Berger and Brothers necessarily reflect an ontologically rarefied state. It makes the historical trace complicit to its varying degrees of disclosure by focusing on the presentness of the past’s trace, preserving the meaningful possibilities of historical musicology while acknowledging that we are subjective “fallible human beings”.[48]

Secondly, we might seek to preserve the resistive dimension of historical blind-spots through acts of criticism, using, as Haydn White suggests, interpretive gestures “to create perplexity in the face of the real – not to clear it up”.[49] But “perplexity” does not mean taking a postmodern attitude of relativistic free-play in the face of the void. What White means by “creating perplexity” is to transform the unresponsive resistive void of the historical into a productive force, a force to unsettle normative musicological concepts taken for granted, and a creative force to imagine other regulative possibilities for musical ontology. This approach foregrounds the importance of musicology’s affective orientation towards performance and criticism as a necessary “co-product” of performance-reception,[50] reminding the listener of the levels of mediation and uncertainty in the medium of performance. The unsettling character of the ficta ghost by nature already delimits “space for the bird to fly”,[51] even though one may find such freedom of choice “uncanny” by the strict, logical demands of musicological standards. Transposing the effects of the “uncanny” into an opportunity for reinterpretation and critique, as Joan W. Scott writes, keeps us open to the future of performance-possibilities while being faithful to the trace’s ability to surprise and unsettle our expectations:

“For historians, there is a double challenge here: to write the kind of history that will serve as a lever, unearthing the foundational premises upon which our social and political [and musical!] verities rest, in order … to clear the space for the operations of a history whose direction cannot be determined and whose end will never come”.[52]

Thomas Brother’s face-value “interpretation” of ficta employs precisely that option in seeking alternative ways to conceive of ficta without fashioning a pedestal of authority from which to speak from. By flirting with the “possibility” of his interpretation, Brothers phantomocizes his own theory, acknowledging its own shelf-life and even imminent death by the renovative flux of time, where evolving listening conventions and methodological concerns would have rendered his interpretation defunct. But courting with uncertainty certainly clears the musicological field for other ways of transcribing and presenting early music. Different treatments of musica ficta alter the pitch-content of transcribed scores, allowing for new experiences of listening, and unsettling old ones. Similarly, as Brothers himself has shown, imaginative filling-in of the gaps can lead to creative, thought-provoking analyses capable of grasping the reader and listener’s imagination. If the latter reason is precisely what draws us to music in the first place, then why should we let the void of uncertainty obscure our attempts to make music? Engaging with the historical trace in the face of absence throws into relief the contingencies by which our regulative concepts control and discipline the rules of musical production and listening; creative interpretation makes room for the aggregation of other regulative possibilities, indeed other work concepts – fictional (though meaningful) yardsticks to measure medieval musics yet-to-come. I leave the last words to Lydia Goehr in her reconsideration of the “work-concept” project seven years after her book’s initial publication:

“Either we would seek a work-concept so thin that it could accommodate all descriptions given of it, or we would allow that descriptions could conflict, given our choice of very different prototypes. Again, I prefer, and have tried to argue for, the latter route, not least because it shows so well that how we think about music, how our musical discourses develop, depends in very interesting ways on the prototypes we employ and on the myths we construct. On the purest philosophical plane, our choice of examples perhaps does not matter. But I chose the route of philosophical impurity where our choices matter a great deal. That impurity symbolizes … the intersection between philosophy and cultural diagnosis”.[53]


[1] Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 192

[2] For a collection of the complicated views presented, see Nicholas Kenyon, Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)

[3] In 1986, for example, the American Musicological Society used the term “historically-aware” in its guidelines for the Noah Greenberg Awards. See the AMS Newsletter 16/2, (August, 1986): 5, 14

[4] Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Early Music, 12, (1984), 14

[5] Richard Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past” in Text and Act: Essays in Music and Performance, (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140

[6] Ibid., 102

[7] Colin Lawson & Robin Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 160

[8] See, for example, Greg Kot, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, (New York: Scribner, 2009)

[9] Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), See Introduction

[10] Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

[11] Taruskin, (1995), 102

[12] This is not to suggest that recordings themselves are “authentic” representations of the time period in any way. The technological restrictions of recording devices may impose real, musical restrictions on the way a piece of music is performed ‘for the microphone’. The time-restrictions on the early 331/3 rpm record, for example, affected tempo-decisions and repertoire choices and playing styles to suit the demands of technology of the day. See Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Music History, (New Haven, Connecticut & London: Yale University Press, 2000)

[13] Margaret Bent, “Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9” in Early Music, 2003, 387

[14] One can draw an analogue between the auraticization of manuscript sources and Derridean “archival-fever” as what Dominick LaCapra calls a “fetish”, a “literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian” and, as such, a condition privileged by fantasies of presence and authenticity. See LaCapra, History and Criticism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)

[15] Harry White, “‘If It’s Baroque, Don’t Fix It’: Reflections on Lydia Goehr’s ‘Work-Concept’ and the Historical Integrity of Musical Composition” in Acta Musicologica, Vol. 69, Fasc. 1. (Jan – Jun, 1997), 97

[16] Margaret Bent, “The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis” in Tonal Structures in Early Music, Ed. Cristle Collins Judd, (New York & London: Garland, 1998), 18

[17] Ibid., 19

[18] Ibid., 20

[19] Ibid., 19

[20] To be fair to Bent, she does later point out that sometimes unica (unique cases) offer divergences from the hard-and-fast musical language “rules” she seeks to unearth. But she maintains firmly that such faults must be solely that of the scholar who places “too much weight” on “isolated or eccentric statements” that “may not have universal or prescriptive value” (ibid., 39). However, who decides which theories have “prescriptive value” over those that supposedly do not? By looking for “the” musical grammar, Bent perhaps unfairly disowns the possibility of multiple coexistent grammars, even plural, contradictory ones existing synchronically within the same time period.

[21] This is especially pertinent to music edition-making, in which various sources are collapsed into a single “authoritative” form. Disputes over the “correct” edition of a piece of music may take place when there are more than one surviving manuscript sources, a condition Lydia Goehr (1992) would ascribe to the late 18th Century “work-fidelity” concept that has survived into modern ontologies of music. More recently, the status of notated music has been given a materialist spin, teasing out the individualities of a piece of music preserved in more than one source. See Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: from Jean Renart to Guillaume Machaut, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a concept of multiple musical ontologies, see Philip V Bohlman, “Ontologies of Music” in Rethinking Music, Ed. Nicholas Cook & Mark Everist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17-34

[22] This problematic aspect has been debated by musicologists with regard to the “work concept”. See especially Leo Treitler, “History and the Ontology of the Musical Work” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 3, (Summer, 1993), 483-97, in which he discusses specific musical examples which seem to fall outside the regulative hold of the “work concept”.

[23] Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress, (London: Fontana Press, 1997)

[24] This idea was recently developed by Stefano Mengozzi (University of Michigan), who delivered it in a talk The Making of the Hexachordal System: Medieval Semiotics in Transition at the 75th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Philadelphia, Nov 2009. Also see Mengozzi, “Virtual Segments: The Hexachordal System in the Late Middle Ages” in Journal of Musicology, Sept 2006, Vol. 23, No. 3, 426-467

[25] The following information is drawn from consistent information found in numerous basic books on medieval-theoretical concepts on music. Some good sources include Charles M. Atkinson, The Critical Nexus: Tone-system, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval Music, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) and the Grove article on Musica Ficta [Musica Falsa]: Margaret Bent & Alexander Silbiger, “Musica ficta” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/19406 (accessed December 22, 2009)

[26] See Karol Berger for a more detailed account, “The Guidonian Hand” in The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Ed. Mary Carruthers & Jan M. Ziolkowski, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 71-82

[27] Bruce Holsinger offers an insightful interpretation of the hand’s relation to pedagogical systems of power and discipline. See Holsinger, Music, the Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 259-94

[28] Karol Berger, Musica Ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflections in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino, (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press,1987), 12

[29] Margaret Bent, “Musica Recta and Musica Ficta” in Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta, (New York & London: Routledge, 2002), 67

[30] Margaret Bent & Alexander Silbiger, “Musica ficta” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/19406 (accessed December 22, 2009)

[31] Ibid., 61

[32] Elizabeth Leach, “Counterpoint and Analysis in Fourteenth Century Song” in Journal of Music Theory, 2000, 44(1): 45-79; on the “directed progression”, see Sarah Fuller, “Tendencies and Resolutions: The Directed Progression in Ars Nova Music” in Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992), 229-258

[33] Thomas Brothers, Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval Chanson: An Interpretation of Manuscript Accidentals, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), x

[34] Ibid., 23

[35] See Raymond Haggh’s commentary in Hugo Riemann, History of Music Theory, Books I and II: Polyphonic Theory to the Sixteenth Century, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 396-7

[36] Thomas Christenson, Tonality Before and After, paper given at the 75th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Nov 2009

[37] Bent, (2002), 82

[38] Jacques Derrida, The Spectres of Marx, (London: Routledge, 1994)

[39] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, (London: Vintage, 1993)

[40] Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)

[41] This formula is elaborated widely in many of Žižek’s books, one of which is The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy worth Fighting For?, (London: Verso, 2008)

[42] Nick Peim, “Spectral Bodies: Derrida and the Philosophy of the Photograph as Historical Document” in Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2005, 76

[43] Jacques Derrida, “The Specters of Marx” in The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, Ed. Julian Wolfreys, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 143

[44] Christopher Small’s preferred term to synthesize the heterogeneous messiness of music-related activity, see Small, Muscking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1998), Chapter 1

[45] Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 216

[46] Goehr, (1992), 102

[47] Christensen, (2009)

[48] Rob C. Wegman, “Historical Musicology: Is It Still Possible?” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, Ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, (New York & London: Routledge, 2003), 144

[49] Haydn White, “The Aim of Interpretation is to Create Perplexity in the Face of the Real: Haydn White in Conversation with Erlend Rogne” in History and Theory, 48, (Feb, 2009), 74

[50] Nicholas Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

[51] Robert A. Rosenstone, “Space for the bird to fly” in Manifestos for History, Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan & Alun Munslow, (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 11-18

[52] Joan W. Scott, “History-Writing as Critique” in Manifestos for History, Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan & Alun Munslow, (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 26

[53] Lydia Goehr, “‘On the Problems of Dating’ or ‘Looking Backward and Forward with Strohm’” in Liverpool Music Symposium I, The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, Ed. Michael Talbot, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 245