… and Heussenstamm has a good example on pg 100 of his book LOL:
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All the examples show up for English lyrics. A lot (a lot) of good music is written in Italian, French, German, Russian, Czech lyrics, to only name a few. The singers voice is used quite specifically and quite differently in all of these languages. Beaming by rhythm is not always helpful in this context, quite often, depending on style too, quite contrarily.
You would never sing La Bohème sight-reading, so you have plenty of time to make sure where the beats are 
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It’s certainly true that more European publishers have kept traditional beaming than ones in Anglophone countries.
But here’s a snippet of a piece I had to sing the other day, which was full of passages similar to this. Yes, I can read it, but it would have been a lot clearer with the beats grouped together.
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Strange. I had a look on both. The second one was much clearer for me as a musician who wants to see the rhythmical pattern first. But on the other side, when I pretented to look it as a singer, the first one was more suitable, as putting the syllables below the notes wasn’t difficult and didn’t really care about the logic of the rhythmical structure. Saying this I don’t mean that the autor was wrong about his recommendation, only that, they are many different points we need to consider when we assess even such a tiny detail…
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This sort of brings up the whole point of standardized notation. In the 1940s we still had some notation guides recommending beaming to the syllable as in Archibald Jacob’s book Musical Handwriting, pg 57:
So … what happened in the 1950s to change notation styles that by the 1960s we have every single notation guide recommending our modern beaming? Well, the 1950-60s were the heyday of the studio orchestra. Music was expected to be sightread and mistakes were either expensive or permanent. Notation styles changed, evolved, and standardized to favor the sightreader, including vocal music.
If I’m going to rehearse an opera for two months and have it memorized, it doesn’t matter very much how it’s notated. If my first read-through is going to be a recorded “take,” then it does. Music notation standardized in the 1950-60s, including vocal music, as recorded music was now expected to be sightread. As a result, standardized beaming, as in instrumental music, is now the expected norm.
Throughout my 30+ year copying career, I have never done any historical work, so while I am a complete notation geek and student of notation history, this is not an issue I’ve ever had to personally really deal with, unlike many others on this forum that deal with this on a daily basis. If a composer wanted to use syllabic beaming on a new work, I would certainly fight them on that, and only cave if the publisher insisted on that style.
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People got smarter
(Just kidding, obviously…)
I have to admit that I don’t understand this argument.
It very much sounds to me like “A clarinet is played different from a Tuba, therefore the beaming needs to be different”. I don’t see why beaming should change when the lyics are translated from English to German?
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What my experience about vocal music can tell (I’m a professional opera singer since 2001, and engraving passionate since Dorico 1 (I did not really like what I was doing in Sibelius, probably because it being so intuitive, I never learned the proper way. For this, I bless Dorico), whenever I have delivered a vocal work with modern beaming, I was asked, one way or another, to stick to the traditional beaming to the text.
One thing that is very important with the text in music by geniuses like Puccini, Gounod, Bizet or Verdi is that they mastered the art of dynamic accents in the text (and don’t get me started about “there is no tonic accent in French” BS). This means beaming to the text can also give indications about the music inside the text, intricated with the music of the melody. Slurs can be avoided when beaming to the text, giving those explicit slurs more musical meaning (than just “beware, this is the same syllable”, because that’s what the beaming is already saying).
In any case, I think it’s perfectly fine that both systems exist and are used in different context, and I see absolutely no problem if a client asks me to change the beaming to one way or another.
One last thing: opera singers are requested to master their role when they arrive at the beginning of the production, so the sightreading problem really does not exist.
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This example is very convincing ignoring all other staff below, before and after it. But I’ve conducted quite a lot of Puccini, and seeing the FULL score, where these vocal parts are on the TOP of the orchestral material, it is much less confusing.
Actually your point of view gave me just a hint, how things complex are, and we can see things so differently according to our considerations.
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The old pile-of-flags-with-random-beams custom is alright, for ancient historical church vocal music that sits on downbeats all day.
Most vocal parts, in most styles that “the people” actually listen to, in the last 100+ years or so, are the most syncopated of any instrument. Kind of the last place where dispensing with logical notation seems like a sane plan, to me.
But then again, I’ve only got 2 or 3 functioning braincells left, at this point in my life, so I could easily be wrong!
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A convention where even seeing the full score will only get me to a place that’s “much less confusing” instead of “easily understandable and perfectly clear” does not seem to be too convincing to me…
But since the topic of “intuitiveness” comes up quite often here on the forums, I guess it is just this: If you have spent long enough with this kind of notation, it is perfectly fine for you and you have trained your brain to correctly read such rhythms, while everybody else who looks at it for the first time just sees problems everywhere
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Completely agree. To be honest sometimes I needed to make some calculation in these cases to figure out the rhythmical context, but had a good help by having all instrumental parts around unlike to the excerpts shown in this topic above.
On the other side they are singers who don’t really care about theory, they just want to solve everything very pragmatically and for them beams adjusted to syllables is an easier way.
As long as I can beam as I think best, I’m not really worried about the various competing theories. What Dorico supports, I am happy to leave in the capable hands and minds of the Development Team.
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Fred, in my opinion the second line looks like a song.
I find your aspect of clearness convincing, but in this example the music looks like something that this music simply is not…
Very well described, Marc…
The text, when its beamed to syllables even takes another level of attention, in my impression it looks more important. Just from first view, you have to have a closer look to it, what it means and it is not a self evident part of the music…
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Is that an argument for dictatorship? 
I don’t understand… So, for a complicated opera, the music has to “look” complicated? 
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I think that is not the ideal question. As I wrote above: Not everything has to look like a song.
Music (and the way to transcript it) is transporting loads of human ideas: gift, traditions, culture, very different cultures, aesthetics, imaginations, even clichés. Its not only interesting, its deeply fascinating to understand, what one thinks, when he or she is doing it so or the other way. I see in this the core of being human: discovering the other and then rethink, what you are or what you have thought you’ve been.
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My apologies, the question was - of course - quite "devil’s advocat"ish.
When you said “it looks like song”, my first thought was “well, it is a song, so what’s wrong with that?” 
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Couldn’t there be a big difference between a song and an aria?
I know what you mean: the quality of being clear and simple. That is without a question a big plus point. And we could endlessly (devilishly 
) discuss, if music or any art should always be like that.
What I have discovered is, that every good art has a clear and pregnant expression. But inside, especially the way through its emergence, it isn’t.