Hi there,
I’m using Dorico in English but a composer I’m working with has asked me to notate everything in Italian … as such I have to rename all of the instruments, and I wonder how to replace the auto-generated suffix “(B flat)” from the Clarinet part and call it B instead…
thank you!
Wouldn’t it be Si♭ in Italian ?
In French it surely would be. For now, I simply get rid of every automatic function (in the Names editor, I choose the “never” option towards the bottom of the window) and input it manually.
As far as I know (maybe I’m wrong), “Tromba in B” is the same is “Tromba in Sib”. B is European for B flat. H is European for B natural.
Selecting “Never” in “Show Transposition” doesn’t do anything for me, unfortunately, I’ve tried it before but always thought it was a bug or something…
See screenshot…
Check Layout Options–Staves and Systems–Staff labels. There’s an option there for showing or hiding transpositions as well.
What do you mean by “Never show doesn’t work,” exactly?
“Never” doesn’t apply to the Layout Name, which is a separate (and separately editable) token. Maybe that’s what asbefore is referring to.
Note: B is German for B flat, not ‘European’. Same applies to H for B natural. There may be other languages that adopted the German nomenclature, but it’s not a general rule here. OTOH, Tromba in B will generally be understood to be in B flat, as there is no trumpet in B natural that I know of. There is a lot of ‘Pig Italian’ in music, and languages tend to get mixed up quite a lot.
Ah - found it - thank you!
Marc suggested using “Show Transposition: Always | Follow Layout Options | Never” button under “Edit Names”
and that didn’t work for me in trying to remove the (B flat) part of:
Clarinetto (Si♭) (B Flat)
from my layout names.
Right – would you care to expand on the history of this? I’d be curious to hear.
I wonder if this is something Dorico can expand on for the future, as sometimes people will use Dorico in one language but use nomenclature from another language – especially the case of copyists who may be working on a project of another composer.
Perhaps there could be a “nomenclature” setting for a score, so if you’re using English as your operating system language but want to use German nomenclature for things like divisi and tempo indications, you would be able to… and so on.
Preliminary work began on this area before Dorico v1.0 was launched, but my understanding is that the development team haven’t had a chance to prioritise this. Instrument names have been localised; transpositions have, to a point (e.g. “in” vs “en”) but that’s about it so far.
right – there’s also the specialised language for changing instruments (“muta in picc.”)…
just to update - I was finally able to edit out the “B Flat” out of the Layout Name not by using “Edit Names” (as Marc suggested) but by double clicking the name of the Layout… (see graphic) and manually taking it out. Unchecking the transposition options in Layout Options that Dan suggested also didn’t work.
Oh, I wasn’t clear on what you meant. That is for editing the layout name; my method was for editing the staff label. Those two things are independent from one another.
I get it now - than you Dan!
Sorry I did not understand you wanted to change the layout name… In any case, I have to change both the layout name AND the instrument name to make everything look ok in French (or Italian or Spanish, if I am not mistaken).
great, thanks! and what about change instrument text, e.g. for example “to Piccolo” vs. “muta in piccolo”?
In Medieval music theory (main figure: Guido of Arezzo, basically the inventor of Western music notation), a melody was considered moving through hexachords. A hexachord is a subrange of 6 of the entire range of possible diatonic notes, with the intervals 1-1-½-1-1. There were 3 possible hexachords: naturale (CDE|FGA), durum (“hard”) (GAB|CDE) and molle (“soft”), that started on F, but had to have a flattened B to make the middle interval also a half step (FGA|bCD), in order to avoid the dreaded tritonus (augmented fourth), the diabolus in musica. Sometimes, the flat was not even notated, as an educated singer knew when the melody had wandered off from, say, hexachordum naturale to hexachordum molle. But in case this was ambiguous (or maybe because singers weren’t trusted to know their theory), however, a ‘round b’ (b rotundum) was used to indicate the low B, and a square b (b quadratum) indicated the high (non-flattened) B. Other names were ‘b durum’ and ‘b molle’. The square durum symbol happened to look like a Gothic (blackletter) h (𝔥), which is probably why that name stuck in the German-speaking world.
The durum symbol evolved into our natural sign ♮, and the b molle into our flat ♭, which the French and the rest of the romance-speaking world nowadays call bémol, bemolle etc. Dur and Moll have become the modern German words for major and minor keys.
More info e.g. here or here.
Peter, thank you very much. One never stops learning. Why did one not hear about these elementary basics earlier? Should be standard at every music college! Probably most professional musicians don’t have this knowledge…
Thank you Peter! Fascinating.
