Does Musescore have a callable interface; how severable are pieces?

I am using Musescore to clean up songs and output midi, then want to use them on a Raspberry Pi (3B) system that displays music at a piano. The piano has a Midi interface, and I have a working version of this already using TSE3 as a library and just playing MIDI output. The idea is this is a way for a student to hear the (if somewhat mechanical) timing of a piece while learning to play it, and slow it down, replay measures, etc.

Musescore as a whole runes too slowly, plus I want something integrated with the rest of this system (which is in turn integrated with Calibre as a library for example).

What I would really like to do is JUST put up the score (from a musescore file, not midi) in Musescore and let it play - no editing or other complexities, and see if I can thus prune it down to where it can run with adequate response.

Some brief reading makes me think this is unlikely - it looks like most API related info is for doing additions on top of Musescore, not the reverse. I suppose I could take the source and start pruning away, but before even heading down that route....

Would anyone who is familiar with the code offer a suggestion? Is this even a viable way to get a music display synchronized (e.g. showing bar at a time) with midi playback? Better alternatives to suggest?

Incidentally I'm not asking about playing midi from musescore, I've got that working in a variety of favors. What I'm really asking about is just the functionality of opening a file, displaying the score, and playing it, and trying to prune down the memory and processing overhead where it may work OK on a Pi (right now it works, but really poorly, and throws a few failures such as memory allocations).

Thanks in advance,

Linwood