A Damsel With a Dulcimer

I’ve booked our final night’s holiday in York. Whee, holiday!

I was dithering over which concert we should book for that last evening. I had narrowed it down to either Handel’s Messiah in York Minster, which is bound to sound amazing – a choral work in the massive echo-chamber of the Minster; or, alternately, a group called Safar, singing and playing music from along the 13th Century Silk Road in the lovely sounding venue of a candlelit church – different, but possibly weird, given that it includes music from the Mongol Empire and other odd places. I ummed and dithered, and asked Charles for his opinion. He had none, not being familiar with any of the music.

So in the end I’ve booked us tickets for Safar, reason being;
1) I like candles,
and
2) They will be playing some funky-sounding instruments that I’ve never heard of before such as a gittern, a darrabukka, a tombak, a daf... but also a dulcimer, and ever since my teens I have wondered what a dulcimer is…

From Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Khan – ‘a damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw.’

So now I shall know!