Re: Visual question--reduce vertical occupation of text blocks

[Mark Polesky]

> The first is at the beginning contrabass part

Actually, there's plenty of room above the contrabass staff, if you
keep the text there as two lines. Below the staff, you have plenty
of room to make it one line.

> The second is at bar 5, tamtam part

For the Tamtam part, you have pelnty of room to make it one line,
but I would recommend putting it above the staff and right-aligning
it so that all the text comes before the music starts (there's
plenty of room there too), like this:

^\markup \general-align #X #RIGHT "Scrape the surface..."

In general, I'm pretty sure it's conventional to place such
technical instructions (as both examples here) above the staff, not
below. I could be wrong, though.

Still, it's incredible what LilyPond allows visually-impaired users
to do. I'm astounded. The score looks beautiful!

- Mark