What I've been up to

So what have I been doing on the creative front for the last couple of weeks?
Rehearsals for the Narnia play have been in full swing since mid-June, so there’s a couple of those a week; I’ve done some tidying up on the three Brass Band movements I wrote earlier in the year, particularly on the third movement, the fastest of the three. The ending of it hadn’t satisfied me for a while, and finally I cut out a chunk completely, bringing two sections together (with a small amount of connecting material), and then added about twenty bars at the end consisting of previously used music in a slightly different guise. At the moment I’m a lot more satisfied with it.
However, when you aren’t satisfied with something it isn’t always easy to see what the basic problem is. Someone else might come along and say, ‘Here, the problem wasn’t the end, but this bit of rubbish in the middle.’ Well, for the moment I think it was the end that was the problem, so that’s what I’ve fixed.
I’m going to go back to the two movements I wrote for a string quartet too, and start to do some serious work on revising those. One of them works pretty well, but again I’m not entirely sure that I’m comfortable with the ending, which could be said to peter out. That may be fine, but I’ll need to think some more about it. Usually what happens is I look at it and look at it and can’t see what I need to do to get it right and then go off and do something else (like sleep) and the answer will arrive.
I need to finish the Peter Olds songs too – I’ve written five of them and there are still three to go.
So plenty of work on the horizon!