What is this for?

If you are writing a C# program that consumes MusicXML files (a digital format for sheet music), it may be helpful to deserialize MusicXML files to a strongly typed class instead of manually parsing the XML document.

These C# classes help you do that. They are auto-generated from the official MusicXML schema definition files using the XmlSchemaClassGenerator project.

Excerpt Sample

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 /// <summary>
    /// <para>The score-partwise element is the root element for a partwise MusicXML score. It includes a score-header group followed by a series of parts with measures inside. The document-attributes attribute group includes the version attribute.</para>
    /// </summary>
    [System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("XmlSchemaClassGenerator", "2.0.0.0")]
    [System.SerializableAttribute()]
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlTypeAttribute("score-partwise", Namespace="", AnonymousType=true)]
    [System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategoryAttribute("code")]
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlRootAttribute("score-partwise", Namespace="")]
    public partial class ScorePartwise
    {
        
        [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("work", Namespace="")]
        public Work Work { get; set; }
        
        /// <summary>
        /// <para>The movement-number element specifies the number of a movement.</para>
        /// </summary>
        [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("movement-number", Namespace="")]
        public string MovementNumber { get; set; }
        
        /// <summary>
        /// <para>The movement-title element specifies the title of a movement, not including its number.</para>
        /// </summary>
        [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("movement-title", Namespace="")]
        public string MovementTitle { get; set; }
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Usage Example

I briefly tested each C# class against one MusicXML file sourced from MuseScore.org (ClassicMan's transcription of Chopin's Scherzo No. 2 Op. 31):

using System;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.IO;

namespace ExampleProgram
{
    static class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MusicXmlSchema.ScorePartwise));

            // Uncompress the MusicXML file if it ends with a .mxl before passing it in
            string filename = "scherzo-no-2-opus-31.xml";

            // Your fully typed score
            var score = serializer.Deserialize(new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Open)) as MusicXmlSchema.ScorePartwise;

            Console.WriteLine(score.Credit[0].CreditWords.Value);
            // Output: Scherzo No. 2 in B♭ Minor
            Console.WriteLine(score.Part[0].Measure[0].Note[0].Pitch.Step);
            // Output: B

            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

Folder Structure

Each folder contains:

• The original MusicXML schema definition files as downloaded from musicxml.com for that version
• The converted XSD -> C# class for XML deserialization

Generation

1. Run XmlSchemaClassGenerator on each MusicXML version of the musicxml.xsd files.
2. Manually remove some extra generated classes X_1, X_2 (there were 19 instances of these extra classes).

Credits

Thanks to XmlSchemaClassGenerator for a great conversion library.

I tried other tools like .NET's built-in xsd.exe and the commercial xsd2code, but both xsd.exe and xsd2code do not pascal case names (they capitalizes the first letter but doesn't pascal case according to the dashes in element names).

The original XmlSchemaClassGenerator uses _ underscores between words instead of plain pascal casing so this fork has a quick patch to remove the _ to allow plain pascal casing.

The generated C# classes also contained some repeat _1 _2 _3 suffix classes that caused errors when I tried the usage example so I manually removed those.