While we have the very nice ability to change a score between Concert Pitch and Transposed Pitch, I’m looking for the ability to export a score via musicXML the Concert Pitch score so it can be imported into Cubase via musicXML. It doesn’t matter whether I select Concert Pitch or Transposed Pitch, what gets exported via musicXML is only the Transposed Pitch. Am I missing something or is this not possible?
The MusicXML specification says that the transposition used by an instrument is as property of the staff the music is written on, and the notes in a MusicXML file always stored in transposed pitch.
I don’t use Cubase, but if it can’t import MusicXML files which contains transposing instruments correctly, that is a problem with Cubase not with Dorico.
The only work round would be to change all the instruments in your Dorico score to be non-transposing before you export the MusicXML file. In Dorico, a clarinet in Bb is still a transposing instrument, even if you display the score or the part at concert pitch. For some instruments, a “concert pitch” score is still transposed by a number of octaves from the sounding pitch of the notes.
Thanks for your reply Rob.
This all seems more complex than it ought to be. As a compoer, I am most familiar working with scores showing transpositions. Now that I know that MusicXML always stores notes in transposed pitch, the solution in Dorico seems to be to create my own instruments for all the transposing instruments, but that they transpose in the opposite direction. That way I have the ability to work with a transposing score–which is what I’m used to seeing…and then MusicXML would then export concert pitch. I agree in that Cubase does not recognize transposing instruments when importing from MusicXML.
Does MusicXML really always store notes of transposing instruments in transposed pitch?
Since MusicXML is (I thought) a visual medium, would it not just store notes at the pitch they are written? In other words, if one exported a concert pitch score (not difficult to manage in Dorico) would not the various instruments import into a DAW at concert pitch?
If not, one could always send the file to the DAW as MIDI, I suppose.
MusicXML doesn’t really know what a transposing instrument is.
All it “knows” is that the notes on a particular staff are transposed, and if that is the case it stores the transposed pitches not the sounding pitches.
AFAIK Sibelius, Finale, and Musescore all store the data for transposing instruments the same way as Dorico. I certainly have MusicXML files from Sibelius where the music was “atonal,” the composer’s MS was written at sounding pitch, and nobody had ever bothered about creating any parts at all, but the MusicXML still had transposed data for Clarinets in Bb etc.
But I suppose a sequencer program might not even “know” what a staff is, ignore the staff definition data completely, and therefore interpret the notes wrongly. A sequencer doesn’t care about other data in the staff definition, like the number of staff lines, whether key signatures are displayed, etc.
You could try transferring the data to Cubase using MIDI, not MusicXML.