thanks everyone for the various suggestions and for the very interesting conversation that my question sparked.
Since you’ve asked about the context, my piece is just a fairly fast (Presto q=170) piano piece which keeps that pattern. I count it in 5/4 and feel the need to notate it exactly like I did, as it creates the “upbeat” feeling of hearing the second arpeggio exactly mid-bar, on the second quaver.
I wouldn’t notate it in 10/8 or in 5/8 as that would make it too fast and unnatural to count. For context I am a jazz musician and I believe I have heard this pattern or this type of vibe in some existing contemporary jazz piece, where it can be quite common to subdivide a 5/4 as 2.5+2.5 rather than the more traditional 3+2 or less widespread 2+3.
I think I’ll stick to beaming manually for now, it would be handy to have such an option in the future. I remember being able to achieve this in Sibelius fairly easily, and knowing how Dorico is a much better software overall, expected it to be happening over here as well.
Only tangentially related to your particular eighth-beaming Q here, but if you like such notational discussion you might appreciate this some time when you can spin through it:
One thing I’ve always wondered why Dorico doesn’t have natively is shortcuts for “Beam Together” and “Beam Separately” (which are + and _ in my workflow). Feels like I use those on almost every page of any score, definitely much more than whatever those are bound to by default.
Why would I take umbrage at it? He’s using tuplets, which is a totally different topic from what the original poster launched. I would have no objection whatever to having a time signature of, say, 2/2, and then having each of those two beats consist of an eighth-note quintuplet. (Which in my opinion, is what the opening example really is).
The problem here is that in music notation we have no single note value that naturally contains five subdivisions per note. Therefore it is impossible to have a time signature that has a denominator meaning five of anything. Even if we use the style where the denominator is a note rather than a number. Simply can’t be done.
Take, for example, a 3/4 measure, in which the notation of six eighth notes is beamed as two groups of three each. That isn’t 3/4 time. It’s 6/8. Or, to use note-head denominators, it’s 2 over a dotted quarter, which is actually more logical than calling it 6/8. But you can’t do a similar thing with a five equal-note beam. There’s no such note.
When I was going to Juilliard, Madame Rene Longyy, who taught ear training and notation to all conducting and composing majors, tried to get the musical world to accept a notehead with a pattern of two dots stacked vertically after the notehead to show a five-subdivision note. In other words, in writing the shape that we would call a ‘colon.’
She failed to convert anyone. If she had succeeded, there would be a five-subdivision note head, and then a 2 over whatever note head meant five subdivisions would make sense. Unfortunately, the way music notation is constructed at the moment, there’s no way to do it without using some sort of tuplet.
You say the human imagination should not be tightly constrained by a system that makes things easy. I totally agree. I’m not talking about easy. I’m talking about logical.
It’s also using beams. (Perhaps you didn’t notice the fact that the tuplet begins mid-beamed-group and spans them (!).
My point is: you should have no objection to two five-eighths beamed groups in 5/4 because it’s narrow thinking needlessly constrained by flawed assumptions.