Thursday 27 May 2010

Exhausted from the 'last day before project starts' flurry of incoming emails and resulting tweaks to the schedule. Roy brought my newly-serviced harpsichord back this morning, and it sounds much more like itself. Tonight, once I'd picked up DG from the airport, we had a fascinating score-reading session on Mackintosh's bowings and speeds, in the street outside Alison's flat while she was at the shops. I'm sure this sort of conversation happens all the time on pavements around North Kelvinside. 

I retrieved my copy of the Jilted John LP: the song about taking up mouse-breeding as a teenager really does begin with the line 'One fine day I went to the doctor's to get some anti-acne cream'. It's brilliant. I'd also forgotten that The Paperboy Song includes the line 'I got up at half past six/and had two Weetabix'. I nearly wept with joy. But maybe I'm just tired.

The floor around me is strewn with books on harmony and counterpoint, which I won't be looking at for a couple of weeks. I'm getting better at spotting which texts are aimed at understanding real music and its techniques, and which simply aim to provide useless names for things, which can be memorised and trotted out by students in a series of exams in order to get their course credits. 

P.S. Slovenia for Eurovision. Just the right kind of appalling.