Correspondence

The Fiction of 'Diatonic Ficta'

Following John Caldwell's communication headed 'Diatonic Ficta' in Music & Letters, 86 (2005), 161–2 and our previous exchange in Music & Letters, 85 (2004), 511–16, I would like, in this final reply, to tie some loose strands together.

I believe that an expression has a meaning only if (a) its components adhere to syntactical logic and (b) it is capable of being accurately translated in a manner that exactly preserves such logic. Readers (including I suspect John Caldwell) may have mistakenly thought that my dislike of the term 'diatonic ficta' rests on an obscure point of syntax, but nothing could be further from the truth. My objection to it is because of its detachment from any of the concepts and explanations deriving from a single early written source, and also its specific inability to be translated into meaningful English.

'Diatonic ficta', as I have pointed out several times, is a macaronic concoction consisting of an English adjective followed by a Latin adjective. Clarity and understanding can arise only when both terms are (if necessary) presentable in the same language. We could take the word 'diatonic' and render this as a Latin noun 'diatonicum' (following Morley) to yield the term 'diatonicum fictum'. Knowing, as we do, that any genus was considered an attribute only of melody (pace Caldwell's para. 2), we should then understand that 'diatonicum' meant simply 'diatonic melody'. As such, the term 'diatonicum fictum' would then be translatable as 'false diatonic melody'. But this would oppose Caldwell's proposition that the diatonicism is real rather than fake. Even if we transposed the two words syntactically so as to read 'fictus diatonicus' (thereby accepting Caldwell's invitation to view 'ficta' as a noun), we should then be stuck with the translation 'diatonic falseness'—again seemingly in opposition to Caldwell's assertion. The last thing we are encouraged to do is to regard 'ficta' as an abbreviation for 'musica ficta'. This is clear because (a) Margaret Bent asserts (through her macaronic term) that it is the 'ficta' and not the 'musica' that is diatonic, and (b) Caldwell prefers to find a way of viewing 'ficta' as a noun in order to remove the need to involve 'musica' at all.

Caldwell's consequent solution is to regard the term 'diatonic ficta' as a pleonasm in which context 'ficta' can (he believes) be treated as a noun; but we are then still left only with the translation 'diatonic falseness'. A classic example of a pleonasm is the expression 'a false lie', which supposedly could (if one so wished) be translated as 'mendacium fictum'. It is only in that specific sense that I can consider the expression 'diatonic ficta' to be a pleonasm (since, in my view, it combines both falseness and untruth); but even here the 'fictum' of 'mendacium fictum' remains unassailably adjectival. In truth Caldwell misleads himself in believing that 'ficta' is a noun because its function as an irrepressible adjective can be proved quite simply.

The word 'ficta' is in its first-declension form (as opposed to 'fictus' or 'fictum'). The only reason for so presenting it is because it must syntactically agree with a first-declension noun (here, as so often, deliberately and misleadingly omitted): namely (dare I say it?) 'musica'. Indeed the assumption that 'musica' lies at the root is clear because the whole discussion concerns 'musica ficta' as opposed to 'musica recta'. Since, therefore, anybody reading the single word 'ficta' can only understand it as being a contraction of 'musica ficta', it is quite fruitless to pretend that its grammatical function is anything other than adjectival. Simply to present, therefore, a string of adjectives that fails to offer a single crucial noun only obfuscates rather than clarifies any meaning that might be deemed to exist.

So what, then, are we to understand exactly by the concocted expression 'diatonic ficta'? The best I can offer (after many years' struggle) is the following: 'diatonically-used musica ficta'. Having thereby restored the previously omitted noun ('musica') to its...