The height of each system is determined automatically. To prevent systems from bumping into each other, some minimum distances are set. By changing these, you can put staves closer together, and thus put more systems onto one page.
Normally staves are stacked vertically. To make staves maintain a
distance, their vertical size is padded. This is done with the
property minimumVerticalExtent. It takes a pair of numbers, so
if you want to make it smaller from its default, then you could set
\set Staff.minimumVerticalExtent = #'(-4 . 4)
This sets the vertical size of the current staff to 4 staff spaces on
either side of the center staff line. The argument of
minimumVerticalExtent is interpreted as an interval, where the
center line is the 0, so the first number is generally negative. The
staff can be made larger at the bottom by setting it to (-6
. 4).
Internals: Vertical alignment of staves is handled by the VerticalAlignment object.
minimumVerticalExtent is syntactic sugar for setting
minimum-Y-extent of the
VerticalAxisGroup of the
current context. It can only be changed score wide.
This page is for LilyPond-2.4.5 (stable-branch).