Welcome to the first blog post on this, our very own Felton Music website! When Emma George, who has steered the website from the start and done all its engineering asked whether there would be a blog I replied airily that, of course there would be. Now I’m staring at the screen and feeling increasingly daunted by the prospect. If you are reading this - no money has changed hands, but there must be an element of expectation. Bit of pressure there.

Not having much of an on-line-life, I have little experience of reading other blogs, so haven’t got models to draw on, or approaches to avoid. There certainly won’t be any pictures of what I had for breakfast, and nothing about the pony unless it’s really relevant - like discovering how many tunes from the Pirates of Penzance work well for maintaining rhythm while riding. She particularly likes “Climbing over Rocky Mountain”, redolent of her Tyrolean ancestry perhaps.

Riding sometimes provides useful thinking time, and a lot of the thinking I do is around how music works and how people acquire and improve musical skills. I’m always fascinated by how different people think in music - not about it but just it. How do they recall a melody, compare one tune with another, imagine how two notes would go together, feel the sound of a flute? The blog could provide opportunities to share ideas and questions about that sort of stuff - encouraging you to think about your music thinking too and feed it back.

There’s the pragmatic side of the blog too, drawing your attention to stuff coming up. You’ll be able to find information about things elsewhere on the site. That’s the main reason for setting up the website. We’ve got a lot going on, and up to now I’ve been deluging people with emails, trying to make sure no one misses out on things. Your in-box will lighten now. You can check on activities at your convenience.

There’ll be celebration of things we’ve done too. The two years since we started doing more music in this community have been amongst the happiest in my life. Music is good, but people are great, especially when they are doing things together. I’ve always liked the fact that the verb for doing music is playing. It’s a privilege to come out and play with you, and I hope we have many more opportunities to do so.