On the right the Grand Vizier’s attendants gaze across the Golden Horn at the night’s entertainment. From a balcony of Aynalıkavak Palace, Sultan Ahmad III watches fireworks, music and dance performed on two rafts. Drummers at the left are poised to strike their side drums, as others play trumpets and zurna. On the right, men play daff, zurna and pan-pipes for dancers holding castanets.

To celebrate the circumcision of the four sons of Sultan Ahmad III, rafts with fireworks, dancers and musicians floated before the sultan’s tent at the Arsenal Palace. A two-storey floating structure contains pyrotechnicians above and daff players and dancers with castanets below. The row of men seated behind the daff players may be singers.

On the right the Grand Vizier’s attendants gaze across the Golden Horn at the night’s entertainment. From a balcony of Aynalıkavak Palace, Sultan Ahmad III watches fireworks, music and dance performed on two rafts. Drummers at the left are poised to strike their side drums, as others play trumpets and zurna. On the right, men play daff, zurna and pan-pipes for dancers holding castanets.

This picture of a man playing a kettle drum, or köş, appears in a two-volume collection of images of “Turks” of various walks of life compiled around 1790. Although he may have played in the Ottoman military band, the fact that the drum is placed on the ground and that he is not in uniform suggests that he played for royal entertainment.

The lute was introduced to Europe from the Arab world. While lutes were first played in Spain in the 9th century, their popularity grew from the 13th century through to the Renaissance. Changes in the design of the lute and the greater prevalence of violins led to the eclipse and near-extinction of the lute in nineteenth-century Europe.

A common form of drum across the Arab and Ottoman world was the tall tarijat, or goblet drum. It was played held horizontally under the arm in combination with stringed instruments. Its body could be made of wood, earthenware or terracotta, but in Fez in Morocco, glazed ceramic was used. Variants of this drum, called darabukka, were produced in Syria.

The buzuq is a variant of the tanbur, a long-neck string instrument that is differentiated from the ‘ud or lute by its relatively small sound-box and neck of extended length. Its strings are plucked with a plectrum. The mother-of-pearl inlay here exhibits the hybridity of ornament in the Ottoman realm in the late 19th century.

Constructed like a large tambourine, the daff provides percussion in combination with stringed and wind instruments. As the miniature An Entertainment Scene illustrates, daff players also accompanied dancers without other instrumentalists. The daff is a social, rather than martial instrument, and its lineage dates to before the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

This lute has a bent neck, a form that was in use at least as early as the 16th century in both Europe and the Islamic world. With its deep body, its sound was more sonorous than a lute with longer neck and smaller body. It would have been accompanied by percussion in the form of a drum, or daff, and possibly a flute.

The mijwiz is a form of double-reed pipe or clarinet, one of a variety of pipes played by blowing through one end of the pipe rather than a hole in its side, like a flute. The pipes are held together by waxed string. In the 18th-century Ottoman world, multiple reed pipes were played in combination with zurna and daff as the miniature An Entertainment Scene illustrates.

The qanun was a very popular instrument in the Middle East and North Africa from at least the 18th century. Thanks to its range of octaves, it is highly versatile and is played alone or in combination with other instruments such as the flute and kamanche (kemençe).

The parmak (little) cura is a small specimen in a large family of related string instruments. Because of its size its sound has a higher pitch than the larger tanbur. It was used in many regions of the Ottoman world for playing both classical and folk music.

The legged violin is one of the types of bowed fiddles played in the Ottoman world. Its materials, the gourd, with a stretched-skin surface to form the sound-box, may indicate that it derives from folk instruments, but the metal leg and fine wooden neck relate more closely to urban products.

The painting by Osman Hamdi Bey demonstrates how the musicians, particularly the tanbur player, held their instruments while performing. The Turkish form of tanbur has of a very long neck and large round or oval body that produces a resonant sound. The tambourinist appears to listen to the tanbur player, waiting for the moment to begin playing.

The portrait of a woman of the Ottoman court playing a tambourine indicates that this percussion instrument was made in a range of sizes as this one is smaller than that in the Osman Hamdi Bey painting. Moving to Istanbul in 1865, the French artist Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet later founded an academy of painting and drawing there in the European style.

Adelaide Casati attended the premier of Aïda in Cairo where her father played cello in the orchestra. Two years later, age 19, she married Paul Draneht. Following their marriage in 1873 the Dranehts left Egypt and moved to Oggebbio, Italy. This document is their marriage certificate from Oggebbio, witnessed by Adelaide’s sister and her husband.

Wadih Sabra (1876–1952) was a leading figure in modern Lebanese music. A composer and pianist, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire. He composed the Lebanese national anthem in 1927 and founded and directed the Institute of Music in Beirut, later the National Higher Conservatory of Music. He combined Western and Eastern traditions in his operas, symphonies and chamber music.

Although Aïda was first performed in Cairo in 1871, this engraving depicts the set of the 1880 Paris production at the Opéra Garnier. It combines elements of Old Kingdom sculpture with columns topped by heads, all of which dwarf the crowds below. It shows Act 2, Scene 2 when the Egyptians return victorious from their battle with the Ethiopians.

This engraving presents a scene from Act 3 of the 1880 French production of Aïda when Radamès and Aïda meet at the temple on the banks of the Nile. This scene was sung in French by Gabrielle Kraus and Henri Sellier. By 1880 the opera had been staged in North and South America and most of the countries of Europe, including Paris in 1876.

Metri el-Murr (1880–1969) was a composer of songs using his own poetry as well as chants based on Eastern Orthodox models and translated into Arabic. El-Murr was a deacon in the church, and would have been familiar with the codification and modernisation of the system of chants, called neo-Byzantine, in the Orthodox Church in the 1830s.