I did some rudimentary harpsichord maintenance this morning.  This isn't something I do often, as I'm not very good at it.  In fact I'm hopeless with anything fiddly and mechanical - I don't know which area of the brain separates playing the thing from trying to fix it, but there's a world of difference as far as I'm concerned.  I was only trying to remove the lever that operates the buff batten, so that I can send it to Bob to replace the brass knob which sheared off.  This necessitates the removal of a couple of strings: no problem there, except that in putting them back on I stabbed myself in the thumb with one and bled everywhere.  This is the sort of thing that usually happens the night before playing a taxing concerto.  After application of a plaster, I spent the rest of the day working on the music for Thursday's concert, and dropping anything I tried to pick up.  Duh.

It was good to see Olivier Baumont on Saturday - we were able to swap our respective recordings of Alexander Reinagle pieces.  He's kindly given me a credit on his, for going to the library for him last September.  His is part of a fun CD on Erato of North American harpsichord music, which includes some great variations on Yankee Doodle, not unlike Corri's on Duncan Gray.  There's a beautiful if slightly unfortunate photo on the front of the CD booklet, showing a certain pair of twin towers.

I've been listening to old Zappa albums while doing non-musical work today.  Reading Neil Slaven's book has been very enlightening, helping to explain some areas of FZ's work which previously I'd found a bit tiresome.  I now know why God talks about sofas in German, and I enjoy the guitar solos more. I remember reading in Evan Eisenberg's book on phonography about someone who mapped her entire emotional life with Zappa guitar solos.  You could do worse I suppose. My 3 year old daughter came into the room in a flouncy dress during the disco spoof Dancin' Fool and after trying to dance to it, asked "Is this a real song?".  Not sure what the answer is to that one.