This evening, shortly after lord_kjar got home from work, as we sat in the living room chatting to one another we heard a sudden loud, sharp, cracking sort of noise from the corner of the room where the nyckleharpa hangs on the wall. So we went over to investigate and discovered that the piece of wood through which the strings attach at the base of the instrument has very abruptly cracked. This is an instrument we bought from the man who made it, who had commented when he sold it that he wasn't certain if the wood he had used there was thick enough to be up to the tension of strings in tune, so if it ever breaks give it back and he will fix it. It had, in fact, split once before, in a position which was fairly easy to fix (after going through the bother unstringing all 16 or so strings (most of which are resonance strings--only a few are actually in contact with the bow when playing). The last time lord_kjar fixed it himself, since it happened in a time when we didn't have too much else on (by comparison), and he could spare the time.

However, this weekend is the largest folk music weekend of the year for northern Sweden: Spelmanstamman (musician's gathering). On Saturday we will be performing with our dance group, he will be playing Nyckleharpa with the Nyckleharpa group, and he will be joining all the musicians on stage for the "Allspel" (everyone plays). In addition he is running sound for one set of performers in one of the barns on site, and had planned to spend this evening testing the various speakers he has borrowed to be certain that they work well with the sound equipment he owns. Tomorrow night is a concert followed by a dance (and our shift working the hamburger stand for an hour, starting at 23:00), and he does still have to work Friday during the day. So there literally is no time to fix it before the event.

Therefore we called the instrument maker, who said to bring it back, he would loan us another to use this weekend and would fix this one later this summer. He also had an additional speaker we could borrow for the weekend, so the 30 min one-way drive was worth doing. Now he is happily downstairs testing sound equipment, and then he will adjusting the tuning on the new nyckleharpa and practice playing with it a bit. This one isn't quite exactly the same as the other, and he is used to playing without looking at the keys, so he will need to work at it a bit to get it comfortable enough for performances on Saturday.

Not the best timing for the instrument to break, but Way better that it did it today, when we had time to go get a replacement instrument, rather than on Saturday before the performance!