Entering lyrics, Special Characters: Alt-space and Alt-hyphen don't work

This may be related to issue #293912. I'm using MS 3.6.2, macOS 10.15.7.
When I attempt to enter a space within a lyric, or a hyphen, the Alt-space and Alt-hyphen keystrokes documented in the online manual don't work. Nothing happens. (BTW I am assuming that when the manual specifies Alt in a Mac command, it means the ⌘ (command) key.) On my first attempt, I found that Alt-space opened the Spotlight search utility, that being the default keystroke for Spotlight in macOS. So in System Preferences I replaced Alt-space for Spotlight with Opt-space, hoping that this would liberate Alt-space for the documented Special Characters action in MS. But again, nothing happened.