Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

This essay explores the sonic and transformative effects of an English organ’s music at the Ottoman court in Topkapi Palace. It argues that sound is a vibratory phenomenon that touches everything proximal to a sonic event, and that soundwaves create networks by calibrating all bodies and matter on the same frequency. In 1599, Elizabeth I sent the gift of an automated organ constructed by Thomas Dallam to Sultan Mehmed III, leader of the Ottoman Empire. Dallam accompanied the organ eastward and kept a journal in which he documented their journey. Prior to its debut at Topkapi Palace, however, the organ had already experienced changes, including damage sustained during its rough sea voyage and subsequent reconstructions upon arrival in Istanbul. An uncanny instrument, the organ blends tones familiar and foreign as its vibrating soundwaves move through matter, connecting native and alien bodies. While Dallam imagines himself as essentially unchanged, he has become enmeshed in and altered by the Near East: he enjoys new cuisine, is embraced by foreign bodies, becomes sick, and is conjoined with others through the organ’s vibratory soundwaves. Both Dallam and the organ experience transformations during their travels, even as they incite metamorphoses in others through their music and sounds. The sounds that Dallam and the organ introduce to Istanbul create soundwaves that move bodies and matter along new frequencies of vibration, changing them in the process and undoing distinctions between subject and object, domestic and foreign, and self and other.