Ned S

This is a heck of a solid debut. I thought the theme was rather nifty, and the fill was clean . Not the most challenging thursday, but it was a fun one nevertheless Hats off to you Mr Guzman!

Overall I liked this puzzle, but I have a minor gripe. I will grudgingly concede that legato can be used as a noun as clued, but I can't imagine many realistic contexts in which someone would use the word LEGATOS. You would never say a piece of music contains several LEGATOS, or that a composer is know for his copious use of LEGATOS. You would say a piece has multiple legato passages or movements, or that a composer makes frequent use of legato. I guess some amount of crosswordese is to be expected in themed puzzles, but I'm using my challenge on this one.

UPPISH is new (or perhaps, perhaps more accurately, old) to me, but I applaud it as fair fill for a tough puzzle. What I can't abide is SNOOZEALARM. Snooze is a button *on* an alarm that makes the alarm (temporarily) stop alarming. It would be like saying "safety gun" or "silencer gun" (the fact that fire-arms were most readily analogous to me might be emblematic of how I feel about al-arms).

As far as I'm aware, the expression "cannon fodder" refers to the targets of cannons, rather than the projectiles with which to load them. "Fodder" means "food," so "cannon fodder" would refer to that which the cannon eats, so to speak. It's an expression most widely used to refer to soldiers on the front lines whose job it was essentially to absorb cannon fire (read: die) while the rear ranks advanced. In a more oblique sense it's used to refer to something you're willing to sacrifice in order to achieve a larger goal. In the case of a TSHIRT cannon, the shirt is not the target, it's the projectile. No one is eating, no one's dying, nothing's being sacrificed. I have a hard time believing that clue made it past the editors.

I liked the puzzle, but here's a nit: to say an ash "goes down in flames" is tenuous. I WILL CONCEDE: Ashes "go down," yes, but only in the sense that nearly everything else on earth does. To the extent that it does, I'd wager it does so no more often (nor distinctively, nor dramatically, nor necessarily) than the average solid or liquid matter that has ever existed within earth's atmosphere. To put it another way, downward movement is nowhere close to necessary nor sufficient for establishing a definition of an ash. Nor would one ever consider mentioning such motion in any sensible definition. I get that crossword clues are not intended to establish an obvious or unmistakable 1:1 correlation between a clue and its answer, but i will die on the hill of saying a clue needs to winnow the field of possible answers further than (checks notes) **99.9% of all solids and liquids that have ever existed on or near earth or any other planet.** If you response is to point out that I haven't mentioned the fact that ashes are, in fact, associated with fire. Of course, but by the present standard, it would be just as well to clue ASH with "fire sale," because ash is often sold on the open market. Or with "fire bug" because ashes can certainly bug people. Or with "fire blanket," because a coat of ash can form a blanket over surrounding areas. But all of those clues would be terrible, and so is this one.