Have I found the best way to engrave this piece?

[Glen Larsen]

This is a request for constructive criticism: I have a solution but I would like to know if it is the best solution.

Background:
I am transcribing opus 100 by Mauro Giuliani for mutopia.org. Numbers 17, 18, and 19, are preludes which have no time signatures or bar lines. It is my understanding that Giuliani meant for the tempo to be interpreted fairly loosely and, in fact, the first one is annotated with a piacere -- "at your pleasure".

The problem:
It is not enough to only make bar-lines invisible and turn off the display of time signatures. This is because there are wide sets of beamed notes that don't break consistently on measure boundaries and lilypond struggles with line breaking. Setting lilypond to break on beams looks quite bad and I have originals that show nice layouts.

My solution:
I've attached a file with the short but complete opus 100 no 18 that looks quite nice, as long as you never ever turn on the display of the time signatures. What I did was calculate the time signatures needed to set each line as its own measure, allowing lilypond to easily calculate breaks.

It is a short piece with 4 lines and 3 time signatures:  25/8 , 43/16 , and 12/8

(Comment out the \time lines in the attachment to see what I started with.)

It looks okay on letter and a4 paper sizes so I'm okay with this but ... it seems a tad crude. I tried to come up with a single time signature that would allow lilypond to figure out line breaks but to no avail. (Perhaps that problem would be good for a math quiz?) I used a macro in emacs lilypond-mode instead of a calculator.

Just curious and willing to appreciate a correct or more elegant solution.

-glen

prelude.ly
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