Between sources, instruments, and living sound.

Ensemble Rûm is an Istanbul-based early Ottoman music ensemble dedicated to the historically informed performance of repertories from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its work begins with primary musical sources—above all Ali Ufkî’s Mecmua-i Sâz ü Söz, Dimitrie Cantemir’s Edvâr, the collection of Nâyî Mustafa Kevserî and the notebook of Nâyî Osman Dede—and asks how music functioned within the courtly, urban, military, devotional and popular life of the Ottoman world.

Rather than treating early Ottoman music as a fixed precursor of modern “classical Turkish music,” Ensemble Rûm reconstructs a porous sound world in which learned repertory, mehter practice, vernacular song, dance music and the traditions of the wider lands of Rûm intersect. Although centred on Ottoman-Turkish sources, its work is not confined to Turkish-language music or to a single ethnic, religious or courtly tradition. Rûm is understood in its broad historical and geographical sense: the interconnected former Roman lands of Anatolia, the Balkans, the eastern Mediterranean and neighbouring regions. Depending on a project’s theme and sources, Ottoman Turkish repertories may enter into dialogue with Greek, Italian, Arabic, Persian, Kurdish and Armenian music. Some of these repertories are already represented in the ensemble’s work; others are being developed through research, collaboration and language-specific preparation.

This multilingual approach neither treats the region’s traditions as interchangeable nor subsumes them under a single Ottoman identity. It seeks instead to make audible their differences, encounters and historical interconnections. The Ottoman world is approached as part of a wider early modern soundscape extending across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Caucasus, Iran and the Arab world.

Musical notation is studied alongside theoretical writings, archival documents, travellers’ accounts, museum collections, continuing traditions and period iconography. This evidence informs the reconstruction and performance practice of historical instruments. The ensemble performs on instruments reconstructed or configured with reference to period depictions, written descriptions, organological research and related instrument-making traditions. Its sound world includes bowed and plucked strings, long-necked lutes, end-blown flutes, double-reed and natural brass instruments, frame drums and kettledrums. Instruments such as the Istanbul kemençesi, rebab, setar, ud, tanbur, çöğür, kopuz, şeşhane, şehrud, lavta, ney, zurna, nefir, nakkare, def, bendir and davul are treated as elements of a historically situated performance language; their tuning, timbre, articulation, balance and relationship to the voice are explored through research-led rehearsal and practical experimentation.

The ensemble does not claim that historical performance can be reproduced with absolute certainty. Where no securely preserved and directly playable Ottoman instrument survives, reconstruction requires critical interpretation of incomplete evidence. Ensemble Rûm treats this uncertainty as an essential part of historically informed practice, bringing archival knowledge, instrument making, musical experience and artistic judgement into continual dialogue.

Founded in Istanbul in 2023 under the artistic direction of music historian and musician Dr Hasan Baran Fırat, Ensemble Rûm develops narrative concert projects in which musical sources illuminate historical situations. Its first production, “Nicesün Venedik Frengi?”, traced the Ottoman–Venetian War of Crete and was presented at Pera Museum in 2024 and Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall in 2025. The expanded 2026 project “Shah, With What Force Have We Come to Baghdad?” explored the Ottoman–Safavid conflict through a twenty-two-item programme and a sixteen-person historical-instrument ensemble. Current projects include a programme centred on Ali Ufkî/Wojciech Bobowski and an audiovisual portrait of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour’s Istanbul.

By bringing Ottoman primary sources, reconstructed period instruments and multilingual repertories into dialogue with international early-music practice, Ensemble Rûm contributes a historically grounded voice from Istanbul and the wider lands of Rûm to a field still largely shaped by Western European repertories. It seeks not to replace that canon with another closed canon, but to enlarge the field’s historical and geographical frame. Its goal is a vivid, critically informed performance language through which early Ottoman music can be encountered as sound, social history, cultural exchange and living artistic practice.