A happy day because I had a little breakthrough composing. I won't bore with the details, but I wonder how many of the composers (or other creators) here find this familiar. I spend a lot of time pontificating to students about mental attitudes to creativity - how to get over blocks, how to get ideas flowing etc., how to not worry about a first attempt at something being polished/finished/any good at all. And yet do I follow my own advice very often? Do I? Well, today I did, and some rather wonderful things started to happen.

<not smug but a bit tired of being me most of the time, although temporarily reprieved and looking forward to clambering around the modest hillocks of compositional possibility tomorrow like some Welsh goat with the wind in its fleece and an intimation of all not being lost, at least for the time being, albeit with the immovable prospect that Monday may bring a renewed sense of the creatively suspect, and that the good work will be undone, in which case Tuesday will seem like another portal, the doors to which could either rustily resist the doubtful pressure I may bring to bear or, like Door 5 in Bluebeard's Castle, swing open in a blaze of awesome and terrifying brilliance beckoning me forth into the heady but very uncertain glow of musical adventure emoticon>

I asked the kids to write their own programme notes. Some kids drew pictures, some made sincere attempts to capture the spirit of the pieces they were playing, in words. One boy wrote that when he played his piece "I always imagine a sheep standing on a sofa shivering and then all of a sudden jumping off" and when I saw this I thought yes, that's my kind of music criticism!

Practise what you preah

This, from the biog thread, just made me very happy so I've carried it lovingly over here.
 

Yesssss!!!

"I always imagine a sheep standing on a sofa shivering and then all of a sudden jumping off"

And now, live from Olympia, International Sheep jumping (queue Mozart...)!

Well done inc. A