Medieval sheet music

Transcription or facsimile

A modern transcription renders the music in five-line staff notation with editorial rhythm, barlines and often suggested accidentals. It is playable immediately and carries a great many decisions the source did not make. A facsimile reproduces the manuscript — beautiful, authoritative, and unreadable without training in the notation.

Chant is a third case: it is usually published in square notation on a four-line staff, which is neither modern notation nor a facsimile but a standardised nineteenth-century convention, principally from Solesmes.

Musica ficta and what the brackets mean

Medieval and Renaissance sources often omit accidentals that performers were expected to supply by convention. Editors add these above the note rather than in the staff, usually in small type or brackets, to mark them as editorial suggestion rather than source reading. Where an edition prints them inline without comment, it is making a claim the manuscript does not support.