A mechanical source of Turkish music from 18th-century London

Abstract

A late 18th-century mechanical organ, built into a clock made by Henry Borrell of London, plays melodies that sound completely unlike those normally found on English domestic musical clocks. This article draws on the disciplines of historical musicology, ethnomusicology and horology to argue that these tunes derive from the repertory of the 18th-century Ottoman court. The melodies are analysed firstly in the context of the Ottoman repertory and then alongside contemporary European transcriptions of ‘exotic’ music, notably Edward Jones’s Lyric Airs (1804). The distortion of ‘Turkish’ melodies in European representations is set within the wider context of orientalism and musical transculturation; this evidence is then brought to bear on the interpretation of music that may also be subject to mechanical distortion. The article ends with a consideration of how these earliest known sounding examples of Ottoman music may have arrived in London, and what reception they found there.