Musica Ficta

by Anne Kennedy

This engaging and thought provoking fable travels time and space to chart the discovery and history of musica ficta - the story of inventiveness, happy accidents and the power of the imagination. With ingenuity, great humour, and marvellous wordplay that mimics the expressiveness of music, Musica Ficta deftly interweaves and meshes strands of narrative - the Twelth-Century mystic St Hildegard, a prince who wants to be a jongleur, the struggles of Beethoven and Mozart, the decomposing world of James Joyce and the problem of multiple points of view, the rituals of psychoanalysis - to create a captivating allegory of Western history, civilisation, spirituality and creativity.

Genres: Fiction

205 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Anne Kennedy is the author of three novels, a novella, three books of poetry, and many anthologized short stories. Her most recent book is the novel, The Last Days of the National Costume (Allen and Unwin). The Darling North (Auckland University Press) won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. Sing-song (AUP) won the 2004 Montana Award for Poetry and The Time of the Giants was shortlisted for the same award in 2006. Anne has also won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland and at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, where she taught Creative Writing for a number of years. She now teaches Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology.

After leaving high school, Anne studied for a Bachelor of Music in Composition at Victoria University of Wellington. She later completed at MA in English at the same institution.

For many years Anne worked in the film industry as a screenwriter and script consultant. Her screen credits include Crush, with director Alison Maclean, which was shortlisted for an Australian Film Critics Award and an Australian Film Institute Award, and The Monkey’s Mask (directed by Samantha Lang), an adaptation of the verse novel by Dorothy Porter.

Anne is the 2014 Michael King Writer’s Fellows at the University of Auckland.

Reviews

[SpentCello · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there ever was a niche book, this is it. This book was given to me by someone who didn't think they could read it as they didn't have enough music theory to get it. I certainly knew enough to understand the references, however, there was a fine line between the links/references being interesting or too obvious. The central theme was an exploration of the concept of imperfection, and how (particularly over time) intentional inaccuracies or compromises can be introduced by entities/people with other motivations and then eventually become broadly accepted, thus making irrelevant the perfect/imperfect distinction. Music seems a good medium for this exploration as there's so much metaphorical language entrenched in musicology and theory to draw on - and overall I enjoyed Kennedy's meander through these contradictions.

The one part that particularly annoyed me (nit-picking here) was the assertion that to make a string sound a fifth higher, you need to divide it in half. This would actually make it an octave higher, and in the context of that particular section of the book would make a chain of octaves rather than a circle of fifths. A minor point, but there were a couple of moments here and there that took me out of the flow of the novel like that.

I liked Musica Ficta and appreciated the music and historical interweaving, however, I do think this book has an extremely limited range of appeal as you would need quite a lot of music history/theory to not get completely lost, but then if you are already familiar with all of the content, engagement suffers.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

kind of neat experimental 'novel' with multiple sort of linked narrative bits, also little notes about different music history things and short sections of verse. she keeps returning to the phrase 'dancing bears' which is pretty cool i guess.