(diaryland) March 24, 2011 - 11:20 a.m.

I did my first guest lecture thing at university. Not the one I'm going to now; the last one I went to. I showed first year students how to realise a figured bass.

Realising a figured bass is way more stressful than it sounds. Realising a figured bass in front of a whole bunch of students in a theatre on a badly tuned harpsichord is somehow OK. I prefer realising on a harpsichord than a piano. It's less full-on.

So, what this thing is, right, is composers 400 years ago couldn't be bothered writing in a harpsichord player's right hand. They just wrote the bassline with a couple of numbers on it every now and then. You had to do the right hand according to the numbers and your intense knowledge of chord structure and all this other high-faluting stuff about 'affect'. I was telling the students how to do that. I had a clip-on microphone and everything. I think I did a pretty good job. People asked some questions, and then said some very bizarre things after the class. Bless their hearts.

I got paid for it. Booyah.