The resonant sounds of The Newberry Consort filled the halls of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston and transported the audience across centuries of the Ottoman Empire on Sunday. 

The Newberry Consort is a Chicago-based vocal and instrumental concert group that performs music from various historical time periods. The ensemble’s most recent and final program of their season, “In the Realm of Osman,” showcased Ottoman Empire music and art from the 17th to 19th centuries. 

“It’s been an extraordinarily wonderful and fruitful week of history, creativity and camaraderie,” Newberry Consort Executive Director Ben David Aronson said in his opening remarks. 

The program’s theme focused on the idea of finding harmony within cultural, regional and political differences within the diverse music and art scene of the Ottoman Empire since the 13th century.

Chicago resident Maryam Faridani attended the sold-out show and said she felt a nostalgic connection to the performance because she is from Iran. 

She said her favorite piece was the Üsküdar, an Arab-Balkan-Greek-Turkish traditional piece.

“It was a melody that is shared between different cultures — it was really nice,” Faridani said. 

Throughout the nearly two-hour long performance, the eight musicians on stage wove different musical traditions and sounds. 

Traditional instruments such as the ud, a pear-shaped, plucked string instrument prominent in Middle Eastern and North African classical music and the kanun, brought the Ottoman music to life.

Artistic Director Liza Malamut plays the sackbut, a predecessor to the modern trombone. She said joining the ensemble was a very meaningful experience because she originally specialized in Western classical music.

“Being able to learn this music, which has its own incredibly complex music theory, a sound that I never encountered before and then finding out how wonderful it was and how fun to play meant the most to me,” Malamut said. 

In addition to performing music, the consort provided historical and cultural context about the Ottoman Empire. Photos and captions from the “Tarih-i Yeni Dünya,” a 17th-century manuscript that inspired the program, were projected behind the musicians to accompany specific compositions.

Curator and ud player Ronnie Malley was at the forefront of selecting which musical traditions and sounds the consort wanted to convey. Malamut said she hopes the piece selections reflected the melting pot of cultures the time period and region embraced. 

“There was just so much cultural exchange, so many different groups of people learning from each other, so it’s not just one thing,” Malamut said. “Each piece really was quite different from the piece that came before it because it had a different origin.”

The final piece the consort performed had the audience singing along to its Turkish lyrics and led to a standing ovation. 

A recording of the “In the Realm of Osman” program will be available in June on the Newberry Consort’s website. 

“Music has survived for hundreds of years with rises and falls of empires,” Malamut said. “We still have instruments. We still play the music.”

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