I am dipping my toe into this enormous cavern of words, which most of you know well. However for me it is something very new, exciting and just a little bit scary.

I want to be good at blogging in the same way that I strive to be good at music and sound creation. My normal tools are a wonderful array of percussion instruments. I am comfortable around them and they are my family.

Following a few successful column articles I have written previously for the female drummer magazine TomTom in the USA I thought I might try writing my own blog and I hope it creates an appeal.

This afternoon I am finding my way round a new composition written for me by the composer Jean-Luc Darbellay. The piece is called Cosmos and the instruments Jean-Luc has chosen to use are bulging at the seams in my studio in Cambridgeshire. I will be giving the world premiere of this piece on the 31^st October 2011 at Salle Metropole, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Working with composers is a large part of my career and I enter each project with excitement and trepidation. Sometimes a composer will provide tantalising single pages faxed one at a time and then others send a whole score beautifully written. Over the years and now in excess of 170 commissions I have collected them all and hope that one day I will be in a position whereby I can make them available to the public including notes, emails and comment exchanges with the composer. Each one is a work of art and I treasure them all.

Image: ericnvntr (licence: CC BY 2.0)