Lute Down!

I had my first lute-related injury yesterday (if you don't count the backaches I get from holding such a deucedly uncomfortable instrument). Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), it was the lute that was injured, not me. As I was trying flatten my heavy book of lute instruction to get it to sit properly on the piano, it slipped and fell directly onto the lute's rose. A small portion of the rose was damaged; a bit of the delicate wooden carving was smashed. It doesn't affect the sound of the instrument at all, but it does look pretty bad up close. Kind of sad to have damaged it only two weeks after buying it. At least I will now be able to justify buying another lute at some point in the future.

On the plus side, I can now use the lute as a rattle, as a piece of the rose is now loose inside the body of the instrument.

On the real plus side, the lute rose wasn't that great to begin with. It's not one of the fancier roses used in more recently-made (and more historically-accurate) instruments.

It looks nothing like this: