Re: Early (very early) project: The Celtic Song Book (c) 1928

[Valentin Petzel]

> - In older music with lyrics it was common to see beams broken for each
> syllable. Today it's common practice to not do that. I'll leave it up to
> you to decide which style you want to follow. It sounds like you're using
> an older edition for a source.

That is not totally a thing of old practise/new practice. Conventional vocal 
practise is to have beams align with melismas. This has the advantage that 
more complex melismatic lyrics distributions are easy to read. But when you 
have scores with high rhythmical complexity but little melismatic complexity, 
we keep to common beaming (although singers are used to singing quite complex 
rhythms without beams). Also of course in scores for people who do not need 
lyrics like conductor scores you do not want this and instead want regular 
beaming for rhythmic clarity. One can of course try to find a compromise by 
mixing the forms (it is quite common to break beams on a melisma at main 
beats), or by using things like dubdivisions.

In this case the conventional vocal beaming is fine, due to the nature of the 
score. They are just not entirely consistent, as in triplets.

I’ve attached some examples to illustrate the advantages.

Cheers,
Valentin

broken.png
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mixed.png
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