Hi Mark,

Thanks for your comments. They were very helpful and may tend to support what I was trying to do in a couple of places. I like the term "homelessness" to describe the whole tone feel. It is sort of like a reflection in slightly rippled water--you can tell what the reflection is, but it won't sit still and let you see detail; it won't rest. I wonder if a couple of places your ear heard a resting, a grounding, was in measures 6 and 8? I've tried the same device in what I've just added to the piece. Well, half of it; not the fermata.

You might notice the title has changed, which along with the fact that I have begun to use repeats, indicates that it has become a little more than an experiment, and instead of being something to do a little more with now and then, I've spent the last few hours with it. An idea to do a group of pieces which would be impressions of certain cats I've known has been in the back of my mind for quite a while. Tassle and Smudgie were very laid-back and clumsy cats examples of the species. What I had done so far seemed to fit them, so I decided to make the little waltz portray them, too. I don't think all the piece in the group, assuming I write the others, will use the whole tone system, but I think I am seeing some ways it could be used occasionally in a composition using a tonal center.

There is a section of this to come, rather sprightly, in a faster tempo, in which I'll explore how far can be gone conceiving of the whole tone scale in something of the same way as a C, C#, A, Ab, etc., scale--in other words, having half tones available as accidentals. If you go too far with the extra tones available to a diatonic scale, you lose the tonal center, or feel of that scale (or modulate to another one). Similarly, if you go too far using the whole tone scale, you would lose the feeling which is its center. I suppose how far one can go with the extra tones is a matter for the ear, or rather ears. When the majority of ears agree it's too far, then it is?

all best,
mgj
<center><table border=1><tr><td>Tassle
Tassle and Smudgie 9-4-05.not (138.4 k)</td></tr></table></center>