Lady Maggie's Lilt: Martin Eastwell

Music from the Lute Book of Lady Margaret Wemyss

The lute held a central position in the musical life of the Scottish court in the 15th and 16th centuries. Frequent payments to lutenists appear in the Royal accounts. Both James IV and James V were accomplished players, and a French courtier, Pierre de Brantôme, describes Mary Queen of Scots as “blending her voice with the lute which she touched so daintily with a fair white hand”. Despite this, no significant body of specifically Scottish lute music survives from before 1600, by which time Scotland no longer had a court or a monarch in residence. Lady Margaret was born in 1629 at Falkland Palace in Fife, the eighth child of David, second Earl of Wemyss, and died in 1648 aged 19. Lady Margaret’s Lute Book was rediscovered in the early 1980’s among the papers of the Sutherland family, deposited on loan to the National Library of Scotland.

BBC Music Magazine July 2013 **** “Eastwell is a thoughtful, unfussy guide, and the intimacy of his playing is captured in a recording sound that leaves the listener feeling like a favoured eavesdropper.”

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