2. Improvising Encounter

This chapter explores the role of improvisation between early modern England and the Ottoman lands, offering close readings of travelogues by Henry Blount (Voyage into the Levant, 1636) and Henry Maundrell (Journey to Jerusalem, 1697). By listening to depictions of musical improvisation and improvised lives in Ottoman Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, the chapter offers insights into how improvisation was often perceived as an activity in need of careful control, as well as one that reflected the improviser’s sensory experiences. The chapter also attends to silence in travelogues as a space for improvisation on the part of the reader at home, offering early modern English readers the opportunity to improvise identities as travellers participating in the text. This is contrasted with a consideration of the ‘listening cyclamen’, as two seventeenth-century Arabic texts respectively authored by Abd al Ghani al Nabulusi and compiled by Baddradin ibn Salim al Maliki offer alternative modes of existing alongside the natural soundscapes that the English travellers did not see nor hear.