Lady Margaret Wemyss: Lute Book – Martin Eastwell

A girl of eighteen, dying somewhere in Fife between one autumn and the next, leaves behind a book of tunes copied out in her own hand — and four centuries later a lutenist in England decides her taste in French dance music deserves better than a footnote. That’s the premise of this disc, and it turns out to be a good bet.

Lady Margaret Wemyss remains almost entirely a cipher. We know she was born at Falkland Palace, that her book begins its inscription in June 1643 when she was not yet thirteen, that she was gravely ill by the spring of 1648, and that she was dead before her mother followed her to the grave in November of 1649. Whether she saw eighteen years or nineteen is a question that has kept genealogists mildly occupied and tells us nothing about why she wanted these particular airs and dances copied into her commonplace book. The manuscript itself, rediscovered in the National Library of Scotland only in the early 1980s, is a schoolgirl’s notebook in the way that Anne Frank’s diary is a schoolgirl’s notebook. Which is to say: not really.

Martin Eastwell has made a choice here that runs against the grain of prior recordings drawn from this source. Where earlier lutenists mined the book chiefly for its Scottish content — the snap and swing of native airs, the modal turns that sound like nothing written south of the Tweed — Eastwell gives generous space to the French repertoire that in fact makes up the larger portion of the collection. Scholarship on the book, with Matthew Spring’s research as the standard reference point, counts something like two dozen Scottish pieces against three dozen or more French numbers, a ratio that earlier recorded anthologies have rather quietly inverted in favor of tartan authenticity. Eastwell corrects the balance, and the results are frequently ravishing.

The French courantes and allemandes here breathe with a rhythmic suppleness Eastwell clearly understands from the inside. He doesn’t over-inflect the notes inégales, doesn’t turn every phrase into a minuet for effect. There’s a courante about a third of the way through the program where he lets the bass line simply speak, unhurried, and the overtones ring against the belly of the instrument in a way no amount of digital remastering fully domesticates. You hear wood, gut, the room. That’s not incidental. Lute recordings live or die on whether the engineer trusts the natural decay of the instrument, and here, mercifully, someone did.

Where the disc frustrates is documentation, not interpretation. The liner notes describe ninety-one solo pieces in the source manuscript without accounting convincingly for what that number actually contains — poems bound in among the music, apparently, and possibly some English lute repertoire folded into the tally as well. For a general listener this hardly matters. For anyone trying to understand what Lady Wemyss’s book actually is — part music primer, part commonplace book, part literary scrapbook, the kind of hybrid document seventeenth-century gentlewomen kept as a matter of course — the notes leave more fog than they clear. A page or two of actual codicology would have cost little and clarified much.

Eastwell’s playing, in any case, argues its own case eloquently enough. His ornamentation is tasteful rather than showy; he resists the temptation, which swallows lesser lutenists whole, to show artistry at the expense of line. The Scottish airs, when they arrive, have an unaffected plainness that suits their probable function: teaching pieces, dance tunes, things a talented adolescent might actually have played for her own pleasure rather than to impress an audience. Compare this with the starchier, more “authentic“-sounding readings on some earlier all-Scottish anthologies drawn from the same source, and Eastwell’s version feels the more humane, the more plausible as an actual reconstruction of a life rather than a museum exhibit behind glass.

Should you own this. If your shelves already groan with Scottish lute anthologies and you want something different from the same well-picked source, yes, without hesitation. If you’ve never encountered the Wemyss book at all, this makes as good — arguably better — an introduction than the more narrowly focused recordings that preceded it. Lady Margaret Wemyss got, in the end, an advocate worthy of her curiosity. Whether she died at eighteen or nineteen, she had good taste in courantes, and Eastwell trusts her judgment. So, by the last track, will you.