MUSICA FICTA
These terms should not be taken too literally. Indeed, Philippe de Vitry himself, as reported in Ars Nova,
cautioned that “false music” is not false but real “and even necessary.” All that the name implied was that
the notes involved were not part of the gamut as defined long ago by Guido d’Arezzo, and that they had no
predefined “vox,” or position within a hexachord. So in order to solmize them—that is, find a place for
them among the ut–re–mi’s of traditional sight-singing—one had to imagine a hexachord that contained
them, one that may have been “fictitious” with respect to the official theory of music, but whose sounding