Sharp over a note?

[ardcarp]

Rimbault was an early pioneer in bringing early music to life. Scholarship has moved on since then. But all I’d say is to have fun with your sharps and/or flats! The worst you’ll get is a scrummy false relation.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... have fun with your sharps and/or flats! The worst you’ll get is a scrummy false relation.

- and, in many instances, "the best you'll get"!

[Vox Humana]

Every time I see the term 'musica ficta' my heart sinks (for various reasons) and when I see it coupled with the word 'rules' I scream and reach for the meat cleaver. I am seriously sceptical that even academics really understand how musica ficta was applied in practice by musicians of the day, although there have been some very ingenious and mostly well-argued theories, some of which have been too radical (bizarre, some might say) to find widespread favour. One of the problems is that most of those who have written on the subject have tended to cull their data from all sorts of places, mixing up how the theorists define musica ficta with later theorists' advice to composers and singers which may be about inflecting pitches, but may not necessarily be musica ficta. Musica ficta is really about how to sol-fa accidentals that are outside the basic medieval gamut (scale). Nowadays the term is applied loosely to any accidentals, whether musica ficta or musica recta, sung or played, that are performed but not specified in the original music.

The usual (and IMO by far the best) way of indicating these accidentals in a score is to place them above the note. OUP used to print them in smaller type against the note. I find this very unhelpful as I have to reach for a magnifying glass the see the different in size. Bracketed accidentals have also been used, but, again IMO, these should be reserved exclusively for cautionary accidentals. Or you can do what many so-called 'editors' on CPDL do and print them like any other accidental, so that the unsuspecting performer can't tell what what is original and what isn't (and very likely doesn't much care either).

It's a slightly fussy job adding editorial accidentals above the note in a notation programme, but it's worth learning how to do it. In Finale I have my three (smaller) editorial accidentals defined as articulations. I hide the accidental on the staff and then add the relevant articulation above the note. This has the advantage that, if the note subsequently moves due to respacing the music, the articulation moves with it, unlike a text expression which stays put on the page.