dumb question: how do I copy articulations?

New to Dorico here: I’d like to copy a passage of articulations to a neighboring staff that has the same rhythm. How can I filter articulations (staccatos, accent, tenutos, etc.) in Dorico? Articulations (other than slurs) appear to be absent from the filter menu.

I’m afraid you can’t.
Articulations are intrinsic parts of the notes they belong to in Dorico and as such they can’t be selected and copied indivdually.

I’ve been known to copy wholesale from one stave to another, then select the pasted music, hit L and quickly retype the pitches. For longer passages it might be better to let the computer take on the heavy lifting, as follows:

This should work if your material really is homophonic (and there’s only one voice per stave):

Let’s say you want to copy articulations from Violin to Cello.

  1. Select Cello line
  2. Cmd/Ctrl+C (copy)
  3. Select Violin line
  4. Alt+Click to Cello (which should replace existing Cello music)
  5. Set caret at first note of Cello line
  6. Hit L (lock durations for overwriting pitches)
  7. Cmd/Ctrl+V (Paste)

I have to confess I’m on the move and not in front of Dorico, but I think this should work. You may need to delete the existing Cello music between steps 2 and 4.

Thanks for the tip. This is the way I usually work too. Unfortunately, my present task doesn’t make this method practical as I’m cleaning up a complex midi piano performance, and I’ve encountered a long passage where both hands are playing the same rhythm. The left hand, where I’ve applied all my articulations, is mostly octaves. I was hoping to simply copy these onto the many changing chords in the r.h. above. Any attempt to reproduce these chords exactly as played would be a recipe for disaster (This MIDI was performed by a client, it’s not my own music). Guess I’ll have to re-enter these articulations manually. They’re 70% staccatos, so I suppose I’ll start by making everything staccato and tweak from there.

I definitely think there is a practical use for this feature now and in the future, however seldom. If Dorico embeds this information onto the note itself, the ‘articulation info’ is still represented by a graphical tag, and this tag is tangible visual data. It’s certainly conceivable to me that these graphic elements could be copied and re-embed to their destination if that ability was desired by the programmers.

It is possible to apply a given articulation to multiple notes at once, so (depending on which articulations you have in mind) you may find that applying one articulation in bulk and then going trough to change or erase individual marks my save you at least a little time.

Even in a strictly homophonic context, I have found Step 7 to always overwrite the articulations. Is there something missing here or perhaps this behavior has been patched out?

Pasting notes will always overwrite articulations on the notes you are overwriting, I’m afraid. Although I don’t doubt that Leo’s procedure might have worked at some point (though I can’t see how it would have done), it wasn’t something that we explicitly supported.

That was my expectation, but I came across this and thought to double check.