Hello M.G.,

I haven't printed Tassle and Smudgie yet to try playing it, but I can see that my downfall will be the leaps in the bass. That just happens to be an especially weak area in my playing. I've always been lousy playing ragtime for that reason.

The Lento marketing doesn't seem quite right to me, but I think I understand where that slow tempo marking comes from. There is overall a slow rhythm of 3 half notes per measure (that's what you mean by waltz, right?), underneath which there are fast rhythms. I'd probably side-step the issue and use d=47 (47 half notes per minute), and give the player some initial expressive suggestion rather than a traditional Italian tempo.

I wonder, though, whether I'm hearing the whole rhythmic structure differently than what you intended. (This is issue sort of like that famous ambiguous drawing of an old "hag" lady, which if you look at it a different way looks like an early 1900's much younger woman wearing a hat with a feather.) Instead of a 6:4 meter (which suggests a division of two dotted half notes), and instead of a 3:2 meter (which suggests divisions of 3 half notes-- the waltz?), I hear 2:4 (each measure has two quarter notes). This way of hearing the piece probably totally destroys the waltz that you heard when you were composing it. Is the waltz the 3 half notes per measure? I do hear and see a 3:4 waltz starting in measure 33, ending later, but starting again in measure 59. Perhaps you're playing games with the listeners ear, shifting between a 3:2 waltz and a double-time 3:4 waltz?

I suspect that the reason I'm not hearing the rhythmic structure as clearly as you do, as composer, is that no MIDI velocity editing has been done yet. Every note has a velocity of 64. It's fairly tedious to manually edit the velocity of notes. A later version of Composer will have tools that will make it easier to do a lot of MIDI velocity editing at once. The current version does have some options that can help. For example, if you add accent marks, then you can use a Region menu command to select notes that use a particular accent mark. Then you can change the MIDI velocity of those notes all at once.

I'll be very interested in hearing your orchestral version of Tassle and Smudgie, if you decide to do it.

Cheers
-- Mark