I'm interested in writing a fairly bare-bones, standalone application for note sequencing, patch selection, and controlling the master clock of external MIDI sy

I'm interested in writing a fairly bare-bones, standalone application for note sequencing, patch selection, and controlling the master clock of external MIDI synths and drum machines. Is this a suitable framework, or is there something else that might be more appropriate? I feel like the current DAW offerings are A) too complex/big for my needs, and B) focus a lot on MIDI in and not very much on MIDI out. That said, I'm really new to this so I'd appreciate any suggestions on existing software I might have missed. Edit: As far as existing software is concerned, I'm on Linux and I'm not interested in moving to Windows or OS X. I realize software for Linux in this domain is somewhat limited.