‘Musical Diplomacy on the Global Stage: Dallam’s Organ and Lymond’s Spinet’: DunNETt lecture livestream
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DunNETt Lecture 1
‘Musical Diplomacy on the Global Stage: Dallam’s Organ and Lymond’s Spinet’ by Dr Jennifer L. Wood was Lecture 1 in our programme of online talks. Find more about the online lecture programme here.
This fascinating lecture compares the real life experience of Thomas Dallam in taking a self-playing decorative organ from Elizabethan England to the court of the Sultan at Topkapi Palace, with that of the experience of Lymond, Marthe, Philippa and Gaultier taking the horological Spinet there in Pawn in Frankincense. It also compares with this method of diplomacy as used by other countries.
The speaker is Dr Jennifer L. Wood, who is a Renaissance scholar and a member of the English Faculty at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA.
Dr Wood writes:
“This talk will trace the journey of a Lancashire organ-builder, Thomas Dallam, as he made his way to the heart of the Ottoman Empire on a diplomatic mission from Queen Elizabeth to deliver a large, animatronic clockwork organ to Sultan Mehmed III. It will describe the instrument in detail, as well as the transformations it experienced during its overseas journey that are catalogued in Dallam’s journal account of his travels. It will also relate the awesome episode of the self-playing organ’s debut in Topkapi Palace before Mehmed, and Dallam’s subsequent ‘supporting act’ he performed before the sultan. Finally, the talk will turn towards a corresponding episode in Dorothy Dunnett’s Pawn in Frankincense, in which Lymond conveys a clock spinet to Turkey in the mid-1500s.”
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