Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part (in contrast to orchestral music, in which each string part is played by a number of performers). However, by convention, it usually does not include solo instrument performances.
Because of its intimate nature, chamber music has been described as "the music of friends".[1] For more than 100 years, chamber music was played primarily by amateur musicians in their homes, and even today, when chamber music performance has migrated from the home to the concert hall, many musicians, amateur and professional, still play chamber music for their own pleasure. Playing chamber music requires special skills, both musical and social, that differ from the skills required for playing solo or symphonic works.[2]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described chamber music (specifically, string quartet music) as "four rational people conversing".[3] This conversational paradigm – which refers to the way one instrument introduces a melody or motif and then other instruments subsequently "respond" with a similar motif – has been a thread woven through the history of chamber music composition from the end of the 18th century to the present. The analogy to conversation recurs in descriptions and analyses of chamber music compositions.
From its earliest beginnings in the Medieval period to the present, chamber music has been a reflection of the changes in the technology and the society that produced it.
During the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, instruments were used primarily as accompaniment for singers.[4] String players would play along with the melody line sung by the singer. There were also purely instrumental ensembles, often of stringed precursors of the violin family, called consorts.[5]
Some analysts consider the origin of classical instrumental ensembles to be the sonata da camera (chamber sonata) and the sonata da chiesa (church sonata).[6] These were compositions for one to five or more instruments. The sonata da camera was a suite of slow and fast movements, interspersed with dance tunes; the sonata da chiesa was the same, but the dances were omitted. These forms gradually developed into the trio sonata of the Baroque – two treble instruments and a bass instrument, often with a keyboard or other chording instrument (harpsichord, organ, harp or lute, for example) filling in the harmony.[7] Both the bass instrument and the chordal instrument would play the basso continuo part.
During the Baroque period, chamber music as a genre was not clearly defined. Often, works could be played on any variety of instruments, in orchestral or chamber ensembles. The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach, for example, can be played on a keyboard instrument (harpsichord or organ) or by a string quartet or a string orchestra. The instrumentation of trio sonatas was also often flexibly specified; some of Handel's sonatas are scored for "German flute, Hoboy [oboe] or Violin"[8] Bass lines could be played by violone, cello, theorbo, or bassoon, and sometimes three or four instruments would join in the bass line in unison. Sometimes composers mixed movements for chamber ensembles with orchestral movements. Telemann's 'Tafelmusik' (1733), for example, has five sets of movements for various combinations of instruments, ending with a full orchestral section.[9]
Baroque chamber music was often contrapuntal; that is, each instrument played the same melodic materials at different times, creating a complex, interwoven fabric of sound. Because each instrument was playing essentially the same melodies, all the instruments were equal. In the trio sonata, there is often no ascendent or solo instrument, but all three instruments share equal importance.
Baroque musicians playing a trio sonata, 18th-century anonymous painting
The harmonic role played by the keyboard or other chording instrument was subsidiary, and usually the keyboard part was not even written out; rather, the chordal structure of the piece was specified by numeric codes over the bass line, called figured bass.
In the second half of the 18th century, tastes began to change: many composers preferred a new, lighter Galant style, with "thinner texture, ... and clearly defined melody and bass" to the complexities of counterpoint.[11] Now a new custom arose that gave birth to a new form of chamber music: the serenade. Patrons invited street musicians to play evening concerts below the balconies of their homes, their friends and their lovers. Patrons and musicians commissioned composers to write suitable suites of dances and tunes, for groups of two to five or six players. These works were called serenades, nocturnes, divertimenti, or cassations (from gasse=street). The young Joseph Haydn was commissioned to write several of these.[12]
Haydn, Mozart, and the classical styleedit
Joseph Haydn is generally credited with creating the modern form of chamber music as we know it,[13] although scholars today such as Roger Hickman argue "the idea that Haydn invented the string quartet and single-handedly advanced the genre is based on only a vague notion of the true history of the eighteenth-century genre."[14] A typical string quartet of the period would consist of
An opening movement in sonata form, usually with two contrasting themes, followed by a development section where the thematic material is transformed and transposed, and ending with a recapitulation of the initial two themes.
A lyrical movement in a slow or moderate tempo, sometimes built out of three sections that repeat themselves in the order A–B–C–A–B–C, and sometimes a set of variations.
A minuet or scherzo, a light movement in three quarter time, with a main section, a contrasting trio section, and a repeat of the main section.
A fast finale section in rondo form, a series of contrasting sections with a main refrain section opening and closing the movement, and repeating between each section.
Haydn was by no means the only composer developing new modes of chamber music. Even before Haydn, many composers were already experimenting with new forms. Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Ignaz Holzbauer, and Franz Xaver Richter wrote precursors of the string quartet. Franz Ignaz von Beecke (1733-1803), with his Piano Quintet in A minor (1770) and 17 string quartets was also one of the pioneers of chamber music of the Classical period.
Another renowned composer of chamber music of the period was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart's seven piano trios and two piano quartets were the first to apply the conversational principle to chamber music with piano. Haydn's piano trios are essentially piano sonatas with the violin and cello playing mostly supporting roles, doubling the treble and bass lines of the piano score. But Mozart gives the strings an independent role, using them as a counter to the piano, and adding their individual voices to the chamber music conversation.[15]
Mozart introduced the newly invented clarinet into the chamber music arsenal, with the Kegelstatt Trio for viola, clarinet and piano, K. 498, and the Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet, K. 581. He also tried other innovative ensembles, including the quintet for violin, two violas, cello, and horn, K. 407, quartets for flute and strings, and various wind instrument combinations. He wrote six string quintets for two violins, two violas and cello, which explore the rich tenor tones of the violas, adding a new dimension to the string quartet conversation.
Mozart's string quartets are considered the pinnacle of the classical art. The six string quartets that he dedicated to Haydn, his friend and mentor, inspired the elder composer to say to Mozart's father, "I tell you before God as an honest man that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by reputation. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition."[16]
Many other composers wrote chamber compositions during this period that were popular at the time and are still played today. Luigi Boccherini, Italian composer and cellist, wrote nearly a hundred string quartets, and more than one hundred quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos. In this innovative ensemble, later used by Schubert, Boccherini gives flashy, virtuosic solos to the principal cello, as a showcase for his own playing. Violinist Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and cellist Johann Baptist Wanhal, who both played pickup quartets with Haydn on second violin and Mozart on viola, were popular chamber music composers of the period.
From home to halledit
Copy of a pianoforte from 1805
The turn of the 19th century saw dramatic changes in society and in music technology which had far-reaching effects on the way chamber music was composed and played.
Collapse of the aristocratic systemedit
Throughout the 18th century, the composer was normally an employee of an aristocrat, and the chamber music he or she composed was for the pleasure of aristocratic players and listeners.[17] Haydn, for example, was an employee of Nikolaus I, Prince Esterházy, a music lover and amateur baryton player, for whom Haydn wrote many of his string trios. Mozart wrote three string quartets for the King of Prussia, Frederick William II, a cellist. Many of Beethoven's quartets were first performed with patron Count Andrey Razumovsky on second violin. Boccherini composed for the king of Spain.
With the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of new social orders throughout Europe, composers increasingly had to make money by selling their compositions and performing concerts. They often gave subscription concerts, which involved renting a hall and collecting the receipts from the performance. Increasingly, they wrote chamber music not only for rich patrons, but for professional musicians playing for a paying audience.
Changes in the structure of stringed instrumentsedit
At the beginning of the 19th century, luthiers developed new methods of constructing the violin, viola and cello that gave these instruments a richer tone, more volume, and more carrying power.[18] Also at this time, bowmakers made the violin bow longer, with a thicker ribbon of hair under higher tension. This improved projection, and also made possible new bowing techniques. In 1820, Louis Spohr invented the chinrest, which gave violinists more freedom of movement in their left hands, for a more nimble technique. These changes contributed to the effectiveness of public performances in large halls, and expanded the repertoire of techniques available to chamber music composers.
Invention of the pianoforteedit
Throughout the Baroque era, the harpsichord was one of the main instruments used in chamber music. The harpsichord used quills to pluck strings, and it had a delicate sound. Due to the design of the harpsichord, the attack or weight with which the performer played the keyboard did not change the volume or tone. Between about 1750 and the late 1700s, the harpsichord gradually fell out of use. By the late 1700s, the pianoforte became more popular as an instrument for performance. Even though the pianoforte was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori at the beginning of the 1700s, it did not become widely used until the end of that century, when technical improvements in its construction made it a more effective instrument. Unlike the harpsichord, the pianoforte could play soft or loud dynamics and sharp sforzando attacks depending on how hard or soft the performer played the keys.[19] The improved pianoforte was adopted by Mozart and other composers, who began composing chamber ensembles with the piano playing a leading role. The piano was to become more and more dominant through the 19th century, so much so that many composers, such as Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin, wrote almost exclusively for solo piano (or solo piano with orchestra).
Beethovenedit
Ludwig van Beethoven straddled this period of change as a giant of Western music. Beethoven transformed chamber music, raising it to a new plane, both in terms of content and in terms of the technical demands on performers and audiences. His works, in the words of Maynard Solomon, were "...the models against which nineteenth-century romanticism measured its achievements and failures."[20] His late quartets, in particular, were considered so daunting an accomplishment that many composers after him were afraid to try composing quartets; Johannes Brahms composed and tore up 20 string quartets before he dared publish a work that he felt was worthy of the "giant marching behind".[21]
Beethoven made his formal debut as a composer with three Piano Trios, Op. 1. Even these early works, written when Beethoven was only 22, while adhering to a strictly classical mold, showed signs of the new paths that Beethoven was to forge in the coming years. When he showed the manuscript of the trios to Haydn, his teacher, prior to publication, Haydn approved of the first two, but warned against publishing the third trio, in C minor, as too radical, warning it would not "...be understood and favorably received by the public."[22]
Haydn was wrong—the third trio was the most popular of the set, and Haydn's criticisms caused a falling-out between him and the sensitive Beethoven. The trio is, indeed, a departure from the mold that Haydn and Mozart had formed. Beethoven makes dramatic deviations of tempo within phrases and within movements. He greatly increases the independence of the strings, especially the cello, allowing it to range above the piano and occasionally even the violin.
If his Op. 1 trios introduced Beethoven's works to the public, his Septet, Op. 20, established him as one of Europe's most popular composers. The septet, scored for violin, viola, cello, contrabass, clarinet, horn, and bassoon, was a huge hit. It was played in concerts again and again. It appeared in transcriptions for many combinations – one of which, for clarinet, cello and piano, was written by Beethoven himself – and was so popular that Beethoven feared it would eclipse his other works. So much so that by 1815, Carl Czerny wrote that Beethoven "could not endure his septet and grew angry because of the universal applause which it has received."[23] The septet is written as a classical divertimento in six movements, including two minuets, and a set of variations. It is full of catchy tunes, with solos for everyone, including the contrabass.
Beethoven: Septet, Op. 20, first movement, played by the Ensemble Mediterrain
In his 17 string quartets, composed over the course of 37 of his 56 years, Beethoven goes from classical composer par excellence to creator of musical Romanticism, and finally, with his late string quartets, he transcends classicism and romanticism to create a genre that defies categorization. Stravinsky referred to the Große Fuge, of the late quartets, as, "...this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever."[24]
The string quartets 1–6, Op. 18, were written in the classical style, in the same year that Haydn wrote his Op. 76 string quartets. Even here, Beethoven stretched the formal structures pioneered by Haydn and Mozart. In the quartet Op. 18, No. 1, in F major, for example, there is a long, lyrical solo for cello in the second movement, giving the cello a new type of voice in the quartet conversation. And the last movement of Op. 18, No. 6, "La Malincolia", creates a new type of formal structure, interleaving a slow, melancholic section with a manic dance. Beethoven was to use this form in later quartets, and Brahms and others adopted it as well.
Piano Trio, Op. 70, No. 1, "Ghost", played by the Claremont Trio
In the years 1805 to 1806, Beethoven composed the three Op. 59 quartets on a commission from Count Razumovsky, who played second violin in their first performance. These quartets, from Beethoven's middle period, were pioneers in the romantic style. Besides introducing many structural and stylistic innovations, these quartets were much more difficult technically to perform – so much so that they were, and remain, beyond the reach of many amateur string players. When first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh complained of their difficulty, Beethoven retorted, "Do you think I care about your wretched violin when the spirit moves me?"[25] Among the difficulties are complex syncopations and cross-rhythms; synchronized runs of sixteenth, thirty-second, and sixty-fourth notes; and sudden modulations requiring special attention to intonation. In addition to the Op. 59 quartets, Beethoven wrote two more quartets during his middle period – Op. 74, the "Harp" quartet, named for the unusual harp-like effect Beethoven creates with pizzicato passages in the first movement, and Op. 95, the "Serioso".
The Serioso is a transitional work that ushers in Beethoven's late period – a period of compositions of great introspection. "The particular kind of inwardness of Beethoven's last style period", writes Joseph Kerman, gives one the feeling that "the music is sounding only for the composer and for one other auditor, an awestruck eavesdropper: you."[26] In the late quartets, the quartet conversation is often disjointed, proceeding like a stream of consciousness. Melodies are broken off, or passed in the middle of the melodic line from instrument to instrument. Beethoven uses new effects, never before essayed in the string quartet literature: the ethereal, dreamlike effect of open intervals between the high E string and the open A string in the second movement of quartet Op. 132; the use of sul ponticello (playing on the bridge of the violin) for a brittle, scratchy sound in the Presto movement of Op. 131; the use of the Lydian mode, rarely heard in Western music for 200 years, in Op. 132; a cello melody played high above all the other strings in the finale of Op. 132.[27] Yet for all this disjointedness, each quartet is tightly designed, with an overarching structure that ties the work together.
Beethoven wrote eight piano trios, five string trios, two string quintets, and numerous pieces for wind ensemble. He also wrote ten sonatas for violin and piano and five sonatas for cello and piano.
Franz Schubertedit
Schubert Octet
D. 803, first movement, performed on period instruments
As Beethoven, in his last quartets, went off in his own direction, Franz Schubert carried on and established the emerging romantic style. In his 31 years, Schubert devoted much of his life to chamber music, composing 15 string quartets, two piano trios, string trios, a piano quintet commonly known as the Trout Quintet, an octet for strings and winds, and his famous quintet for two violins, viola, and two cellos.
Schubert on YouTube: String Quintet in C, D. 956, first movement, recorded at the Fredonia Quartet Program, July 2008
Schubert's music, as his life, exemplified the contrasts and contradictions of his time. On the one hand, he was the darling of Viennese society: he starred in soirées that became known as Schubertiaden, where he played his light, mannered compositions that expressed the gemütlichkeit of Vienna of the 1820s. On the other hand, his own short life was shrouded in tragedy, wracked by poverty and ill health. Chamber music was the ideal medium to express this conflict, "to reconcile his essentially lyric themes with his feeling for dramatic utterance within a form that provided the possibility of extreme color contrasts."[28] The String Quintet in C, D.956, is an example of how this conflict is expressed in music. After a slow introduction, the first theme of the first movement, fiery and dramatic, leads to a bridge of rising tension, peaking suddenly and breaking into the second theme, a lilting duet in the lower voices.[29] The alternating Sturm und Drang and relaxation continue throughout the movement.
Unlike Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn had a life of peace and prosperity. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg, Mendelssohn proved himself a child prodigy. By the age of 16, he had written his first major chamber work, the String Octet, Op. 20. Already in this work, Mendelssohn showed some of the unique style that was to characterize his later works; notably, the gossamer light texture of his scherzo movements, exemplified also by the Canzonetta movement of the String Quartet, Op. 12, and the scherzo of the Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49.
Another characteristic that Mendelssohn pioneered is the cyclic form in overall structure. This means the reuse of thematic material from one movement to the next, to give the total piece coherence. In his second string quartet, he opens the piece with a peaceful adagio section in A major, that contrasts with the stormy first movement in A minor. After the final, vigorous Presto movement, he returns to the opening adagio to conclude the piece. This string quartet is also Mendelssohn's homage to Beethoven; the work is studded with quotes from Beethoven's middle and late quartets.
Violinist Joseph Joachim and pianist Clara Schumann. Joachim and Schumann debuted many of the chamber works of Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and others.
During his adult life, Mendelssohn wrote two piano trios, seven works for string quartet, two string quintets, the octet, a sextet for piano and strings, and numerous sonatas for piano with violin, cello, and clarinet.
Robert Schumann continued the development of cyclic structure. In his Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 44,[31] Schumann wrote a double fugue in the finale, using the theme of the first movement and the theme of the last movement. Both Schumann and Mendelssohn, following the example set by Beethoven, revived the fugue, which had fallen out of favor since the Baroque period. However, rather than writing strict, full-length fugues, they used counterpoint as another mode of conversation between the chamber music instruments. Many of Schumann's chamber works, including all three of his string quartets and his piano quartet have contrapuntal sections interwoven seamlessly into the overall compositional texture.[32]
The composers of the first half of the 19th century were acutely aware of the conversational paradigm established by Haydn and Mozart. Schumann wrote that in a true quartet "everyone has something to say ... a conversation, often truly beautiful, often oddly and turbidly woven, among four people."[33] Their awareness is exemplified by composer and virtuoso violinist Louis Spohr. Spohr divided his 36 string quartets into two types: the quatuor brillant, essentially a violin concerto with string trio accompaniment; and quatuor dialogue, in the conversational tradition.[34]
Chamber music and society in the 19th centuryedit
Home music-making in the 19th century; painting by Jules-Alexandre Grün.
During the 19th century, with the rise of new technology driven by the Industrial Revolution, printed music became cheaper and thus more accessible while domestic music making gained widespread popularity. Composers began to incorporate new elements and techniques into their works to appeal to this open market, since there was an increased consumer desire for chamber music.[35] While improvements in instruments led to more public performances of chamber music, it remained very much a type of music to be played as much as performed. Amateur quartet societies sprang up throughout Europe, and no middling-sized city in Germany or France was without one. These societies sponsored house concerts, compiled music libraries, and encouraged the playing of quartets and other ensembles.[36] In European countries, in particular Germany and France, like minded musicians were brought together and started to develop a strong connection with the community. Composers were in high favor with orchestral works and solo virtuosi works, which made up the largest part of the public concert repertoire.[37] Early French composers including Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck.[38]
Apart from the "central" Austro-Germanic countries, there was an occurrence of the subculture of chamber music in other regions such as Britain. There chamber music was often performed by upper- and middle-class men with less advanced musical skills in an unexpected setting such as informal ensembles in private residence with few audience members.[39] In Britain, the most common form of chamber music compositions are the string quartets, sentimental songs and piano chamber works like the piano trio, in a way depicts the standard conception of the conventional "Victorian music making".[40] In the middle of the 19th century, with the rise of the feminist movement, women also started to receive acceptability to be participated in chamber music.
Thousands of quartets were published by hundreds of composers; between 1770 and 1800, more than 2000 quartets were published,[41] and the pace did not decline in the next century. Throughout the 19th century, composers published string quartets now long neglected: George Onslow wrote 36 quartets and 35 quintets; Gaetano Donizetti wrote dozens of quartets, Antonio Bazzini, Anton Reicha, Carl Reissiger, Joseph Suk and others wrote to fill an insatiable demand for quartets. In addition, there was a lively market for string quartet arrangements of popular and folk tunes, piano works, symphonies, and opera arias.[42]
But opposing forces were at work. The middle of the 19th century saw the rise of superstar virtuosi, who drew attention away from chamber music toward solo performance. The piano, which could be mass-produced, became an instrument of preference, and many composers, like Chopin and Liszt, composed primarily if not exclusively for piano.[43]
The ascendance of the piano, and of symphonic composition, was not merely a matter of preference; it was also a matter of ideology. In the 1860s, a schism grew among romantic musicians over the direction of music. Many composers tend to express their romantic persona through their works. By the time, these chamber works are not necessarily dedicated for any specific dedicatee. Famous chamber works such as Fanny Mendelssohn D minor Piano Trio, Ludwig van Beethoven's Trio in E-flat major, and Franz Schubert's Piano Quintet in A major are all highly personal.[38] Liszt and Richard Wagner led a movement that contended that "pure music" had run its course with Beethoven, and that new, programmatic forms of music–in which music created "images" with its melodies–were the future of the art. The composers of this school had no use for chamber music. Opposing this view was Johannes Brahms and his associates, especially the powerful music criticEduard Hanslick. This War of the Romantics shook the artistic world of the period, with vituperative exchanges between the two camps, concert boycotts, and petitions.
Although amateur playing thrived throughout the 19th century, this was also a period of increasing professionalization of chamber music performance. Professional quartets began to dominate the chamber music concert stage. The Hellmesberger Quartet, led by Joseph Hellmesberger, and the Joachim Quartet, led by Joseph Joachim, debuted many of the new string quartets by Brahms and other composers. Another famous quartet player was Vilemina Norman Neruda, also known as Lady Hallé. Indeed, during the last third of the century, women performers began taking their place on the concert stage: an all-women string quartet led by Emily Shinner, and the Lucas quartet, also all women, were two notable examples.[44]
Toward the 20th centuryedit
The Joachim Quartet, led by violinist Joseph Joachim. The quartet debuted many of the works of Johannes Brahms.
It was Johannes Brahms who carried the torch of Romantic music toward the 20th century. Heralded by Robert Schumann as the forger of "new paths" in music,[45] Brahms's music is a bridge from the classical to the modern. On the one hand, Brahms was a traditionalist, conserving the musical traditions of Bach and Mozart.[46] Throughout his chamber music, he uses traditional techniques of counterpoint, incorporating fugues and canons into rich conversational and harmonic textures. On the other hand, Brahms expanded the structure and the harmonic vocabulary of chamber music, challenging traditional notions of tonality. An example of this is in the Brahms second string sextet, Op. 36.[47]
Traditionally, composers wrote the first theme of a piece in the key of the piece, firmly establishing that key as the tonic, or home, key of the piece. The opening theme of Op. 36 starts in the tonic (G major), but already by the third measure has modulated to the unrelated key of E-flat major. As the theme develops, it ranges through various keys before coming back to the tonic G major. This "harmonic audacity", as Swafford describes it,[48] opened the way for bolder experiments to come.
Brahms sextet Op. 36, played by the Borromeo Quartet, and Liz Freivogel and Daniel McDonough of the Jupiter String Quartet
Not only in harmony, but also in overall musical structure, Brahms was an innovator. He developed a technique that Arnold Schoenberg described as "developing variation".[49] Rather than discretely defined phrases, Brahms often runs phrase into phrase, and mixes melodic motives to create a fabric of continuous melody. Schoenberg, the creator of the 12-tone system of composition, traced the roots of his modernism to Brahms, in his essay "Brahms the Progressive".[50]
The Seine at Lavacourt by Claude Monet. Impressionist music and art sought similar effects of the ethereal, atmospheric.
The exploration of tonality and of structure begun by Brahms was continued by composers of the French school. César Franck's piano quintet in F minor, composed in 1879, further established the cyclic form first explored by Schumann and Mendelssohn, reusing the same thematic material in each of the three movements. Claude Debussy's string quartet, Op. 10, is considered a watershed in the history of chamber music. The quartet uses the cyclic structure, and constitutes a final divorce from the rules of classical harmony. "Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity", Debussy wrote.[51]Pierre Boulez said that Debussy freed chamber music from "rigid structure, frozen rhetoric and rigid aesthetics".[51]
Debussy: String Quartet on YouTube, first movement, played by the Cypress String Quartet
Debussy's quartet, like the string quartets of Maurice Ravel and of Gabriel Fauré, created a new tone color for chamber music, a color and texture associated with the Impressionist movement.[52] Violist James Dunham, of the Cleveland and Sequoia Quartets, writes of the Ravel quartet, "I was simply overwhelmed by the sweep of sonority, the sensation of colors constantly changing ..."[53] For these composers, chamber ensembles were the ideal vehicle for transmitting this atmospheric sense, and chamber works constituted much of their oeuvre.
Nationalism in chamber musicedit
The Kneisel String Quartet, led by Franz Kneisel. This American ensemble debuted Dvořák's American Quartet, Op. 96.
Parallel with the trend to seek new modes of tonality and texture was another new development in chamber music: the rise of nationalism. Composers turned more and more to the rhythms and tonalities of their native lands for inspiration and material. "Europe was impelled by the Romantic tendency to establish in musical matters the national boundaries more and more sharply", wrote Alfred Einstein. "The collecting and sifting of old traditional melodic treasures ... formed the basis for a creative art-music."[54] For many of these composers, chamber music was the natural vehicle for expressing their national characters.
Dvořák: piano quintet, Op. 81, played by the Lincoln Center Chamber Players
Czech composer Antonín Dvořák created in his chamber music a new voice for the music of his native Bohemia. In 14 string quartets, three string quintets, two piano quartets, a string sextet, four piano trios, and numerous other chamber compositions, Dvořák incorporates folk music and modes as an integral part of his compositions. For example, in the piano quintet in A major, Op. 81, the slow movement is a Dumka, a Slavic folk ballad that alternates between a slow expressive song and a fast dance. Dvořák's fame in establishing a national art music was so great that the New York philanthropist and music connoisseur Jeannette Thurber invited him to America, to head a conservatory that would establish an American style of music.[55] There, Dvořák wrote his string quartet in F major, Op. 96, nicknamed "The American". While composing the work, Dvořák was entertained by a group of Kickapoo Indians who performed native dances and songs, and these songs may have been incorporated in the quartet.[56]
Bedřich Smetana, another Czech, wrote a piano trio and string quartet, both of which incorporate native Czech rhythms and melodies. In Russia, Russian folk music permeated the works of the late 19th-century composers. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky uses a typical Russian folk dance in the final movement of his string sextet, Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70. Alexander Borodin's second string quartet contains references to folk music, and the slow Nocturne movement of that quartet recalls Middle Eastern modes that were current in the Muslim sections of southern Russia. Edvard Grieg used the musical style of his native Norway in his string quartet in G minor, Op. 27 and his violin sonatas.
In Hungary, composers Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók pioneered the science of ethnomusicology by performing one of the first comprehensive studies of folk music. Ranging across the Magyar provinces, they transcribed, recorded, and classified tens of thousands of folk melodies.[57] They used these tunes in their compositions, which are characterized by the asymmetrical rhythms and modal harmonies of that music. Their chamber music compositions, and those of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, combined the nationalist trend with the 20th century search for new tonalities. Janáček's string quartets not only incorporate the tonalities of Czech folk music, they also reflect the rhythms of speech in Czech.
New sounds for a new worldedit
The end of western tonality, begun subtly by Brahms and made explicit by Debussy, posed a crisis for composers of the 20th century. It was not merely an issue of finding new types of harmonies and melodic systems to replace the diatonic scale that was the basis of western harmony; the whole structure of western music – the relationships between movements and between structural elements within movements – was based on the relationships between different keys.[58] So composers were challenged with building a whole new structure for music.
This was coupled with the feeling that the era that saw the invention of automobiles, the telephone, electric lighting, and world war needed new modes of expression. "The century of the aeroplane deserves its music", wrote Debussy.[59]
Inspiration from folk musicedit
Béla Bartók recording folksongs of Czech peasants, 1908
The search for a new music took several directions. The first, led by Bartók, was toward the tonal and rhythmic constructs of folk music. Bartók's research into Hungarian and other eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music revealed to him a musical world built of musical scales that were neither major nor minor, and complex rhythms that were alien to the concert hall. In his fifth quartet, for example, Bartók uses a time signature of 3+2+2+3 8, "startling to the classically-trained musician, but second-nature to the folk musician."[60] Structurally, also, Bartók often invents or borrows from folk modes. In the sixth string quartet, for example, Bartók begins each movement with a slow, elegiac melody, followed by the main melodic material of the movement, and concludes the quartet with a slow movement that is built entirely on this elegy. This is a form common in many folk music cultures.
Bartók's six string quartets are often compared with Beethoven's late quartets.[61] In them, Bartók builds new musical structures, explores sonorities never previously produced in classical music (for example, the snap pizzicato, where the player lifts the string and lets it snap back on the fingerboard with an audible buzz), and creates modes of expression that set these works apart from all others. "Bartók's last two quartets proclaim the sanctity of life, progress and the victory of humanity despite the anti-humanistic dangers of the time", writes analyst John Herschel Baron.[62] The last quartet, written when Bartók was preparing to flee the Nazi invasion of Hungary for a new and uncertain life in the U.S., is often seen as an autobiographical statement of the tragedy of his times.
Bartók was not alone in his explorations of folk music. Igor Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet is structured as three Russian folksongs, rather than as a classical string quartet. Stravinsky, like Bartók, used asymmetrical rhythms throughout his chamber music; the Histoire du soldat, in Stravinsky's own arrangement for clarinet, violin and piano, constantly shifts time signatures between two, three, four and five beats to the bar. In Britain, composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton and Benjamin Britten drew on English folk music for much of their chamber music: Vaughan Williams incorporates folksongs and country fiddling in his first string quartet. American composer Charles Ives wrote music that was distinctly American. Ives gave programmatic titles to much of his chamber music; his first string quartet, for example, is called "From the Salvation Army", and quotes American Protestant hymns in several places.
A second direction in the search for a new tonality was twelve-tone serialism. Arnold Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone method of composition as an alternative to the structure provided by the diatonic system. His method entails building a piece using a series of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, permuting it and superimposing it on itself to create the composition.
Arnold Schoenberg: Second string quartet, fourth movement
Played by the Carmel Quartet with soprano Rona Israel-Kolatt. This is the first explicitly atonal piece.
Schoenberg did not arrive immediately at the serial method. His first chamber work, the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, was mostly a late German romantic work, though it was bold in its use of modulations. The first work that was frankly atonal was the second string quartet; the last movement of this quartet, which includes a soprano, has no key signature. Schoenberg further explored atonality with Pierrot Lunaire, for singer, flute or piccolo, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The singer uses a technique called Sprechstimme, halfway between speech and song.
After developing the twelve-tone technique, Schoenberg wrote a number of chamber works, including two more string quartets, a string trio, and a wind quintet. He was followed by a number of other twelve-tone composers, the most prominent of whom were his students Alban Berg, who wrote the Lyric Suite for string quartet, and Anton Webern, who wrote Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5.
Twelve-tone technique was not the only new experiment in tonality. Darius Milhaud developed the use of polytonality, that is, music where different instruments play in different keys at the same time. Milhaud wrote 18 string quartets; quartets number 14 and 15 are written so that each can be played by itself, or the two can be played at the same time as an octet. Milhaud also used jazz idioms, as in his Suite for clarinet, violin and piano.
The American composer Charles Ives used not only polytonality in his chamber works, but also polymeter. In his first string quartet he writes a section where the first violin and viola play in time while the second violin and cello play in .
Neoclassicismedit
The plethora of directions that music took in the first quarter of the 20th century led to a reaction by many composers. Led by Stravinsky, these composers looked to the music of preclassical Europe for inspiration and stability. While Stravinsky's neoclassical works – such as the Double Canon for String Quartet – sound contemporary, they are modeled on Baroque and early classical forms – the canon, the fugue, and the Baroque sonata form.
Hindemith: String Quartet 3 in C, Op. 22 on YouTube, second movement, "Schnelle Achtel", played by Ana Farmer, David Boyden, Austin Han, and Dylan Mattingly
Paul Hindemith was another neoclassicist. His many chamber works are essentially tonal, though they use many dissonant harmonies. Hindemith wrote seven string quartets and two string trios, among other chamber works. At a time when composers were writing works of increasing complexity, beyond the reach of amateur musicians, Hindemith explicitly recognized the importance of amateur music-making, and intentionally wrote pieces that were within the abilities of nonprofessional players.[63]
Dmitri Shostakovitch: String quartet no 8 on YouTube, Largo; Allegro molto; played by the Seraphina String Quartet (Sabrina Tabby and Caeli Smith, violins; Madeline Smith, viola; Genevieve Tabby, cello)
Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the most prolific of chamber music composers of the 20th century, writing 15 string quartets, two piano trios, the piano quintet, and numerous other chamber works. Shostakovich's music was for a long time banned in the Soviet Union and Shostakovich himself was in personal danger of deportation to Siberia. His eighth quartet is an autobiographical work, that expresses his deep depression from his ostracization, bordering on suicide:[64] it quotes from previous compositions, and uses the four-note motif DSCH, the composer's initials.
Stretching the limitsedit
As the century progressed, many composers created works for small ensembles that, while they formally might be considered chamber music, challenged many of the fundamental characteristics that had defined the genre over the last 150 years.
Music of friendsedit
The idea of composing music that could be played at home has been largely abandoned. Bartók was among the first to part with this idea. "Bartók never conceived these quartets for private performance but rather for large, public concerts."[62] Aside from the many almost insurmountable technical difficulties of many modern pieces, some of them are hardly suitable for performance in a small room. For example, Different Trains by Steve Reich is scored for live string quartet and recorded tape, which layers together a carefully orchestrated sound collage of speech, recorded train sounds, and three string quartets.[65]
Leon Theremin performing a trio for voice, piano and theremin, 1924
Relation of composer and performeredit
Traditionally, the composer wrote the notes, and the performer interpreted them. But this is no longer the case in much modern music. In Für kommende Zeiten (For Times to Come), Stockhausen writes verbal instructions describing what the performers are to play. "Star constellations/with common points/and falling stars ... Abrupt end" is a sample.[66]
Composer Terry Riley describes how he works with the Kronos Quartet, an ensemble devoted to contemporary music: "When I write a score for them, it's an unedited score. I put in just a minimal amount of dynamics and phrasing marks ...we spend a lot of time trying out different ideas in order to shape the music, to form it. At the end of the process, it makes the performers actually own the music. That to me is the best way for composers and musicians to interact."[67]
New soundsedit
Composers seek new timbres, remote from the traditional blend of strings, piano and woodwinds that characterized chamber music in the 19th century. This search led to the incorporation of new instruments in the 20th century, such as the theremin and the synthesizer in chamber music compositions.
Many composers sought new timbres within the framework of traditional instruments. "Composers begin to hear new timbres and new timbral combinations, which are as important to the new music of the twentieth century as the so-called breakdown of functional tonality," writes music historian James McCalla.[68] Examples are numerous: Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, Charles Ives's Quartertone Pieces for two pianos tuned a quartertone apart. Other composers used electronics and extended techniques to create new sonorities. An example is George Crumb's Black Angels, for electric string quartet (1970). The players not only bow their amplified instruments, they also beat on them with thimbles, pluck them with paper clips and play on the wrong side of the bridge or between the fingers and the nut.[69] Still other composers have sought to explore the timbres created by including instruments which are not often associated with a typical orchestral ensemble. For example, Robert Davine explores the orchestral timbres of the accordion when it is included in a traditional wind trio in his Divertimento for accordion, flute, clarinet and bassoon.[70] and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote a Helicopter String Quartet.[71]
Excerpt from Bartók's Sonata for two pianos and percussion
What do these changes mean for the future of chamber music? "With the technological advances have come questions of aesthetics and sociological changes in music", writes analyst Baron.[72] "These changes have often resulted in accusations that technology has destroyed chamber music and that technological advance is in inverse proportion to musical worth. The ferocity of these attacks only underscores how fundamental these changes are, and only time will tell if humankind will benefit from them."
In contemporary societyedit
Analysts agree that the role of chamber music in society has changed profoundly in the last 50 years; yet there is little agreement as to what that change is. On the one hand, Baron contends that "chamber music in the home ... remained very important in Europe and America until the Second World War, after which the increasing invasion of radio and recording reduced its scope considerably."[73] This view is supported by subjective impressions. "Today there are so many more millions of people listening to music, but far fewer playing chamber music just for the pleasure of it", says conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim.[74]
Amateurs play a string sextet
However, recent surveys suggest there is, on the contrary, a resurgence of home music making. In the radio program "Amateurs Help Keep Chamber Music Alive" from 2005, reporter Theresa Schiavone cites a Gallup poll showing an increase in the sale of stringed instruments in America. Joe Lamond, president of the National Association of Music Manufacturers (NAMM) attributes the increase to a growth of home music-making by adults approaching retirement. "I would really look to the demographics of the [baby] boomers", he said in an interview. These people "are starting to look for something that matters to them ... nothing makes them feel good more than playing music."[75]
A study by the European Music Office in 1996 suggests that not only older people are playing music. "The number of adolescents today to have done music has almost doubled by comparison with those born before 1960", the study shows.[76] While most of this growth is in popular music, some is in chamber music and art music, according to the study.
While there is no agreement about the number of chamber music players, the opportunities for amateurs to play have certainly grown. The number of chamber music camps and retreats, where amateurs can meet for a weekend or a month to play together, has burgeoned. Music for the Love of It, an organization to promote amateur playing, publishes a directory of music workshops that lists more than 500 workshops in 24 countries for amateurs in 2008[77] The Associated Chamber Music Players (ACMP) offers a directory of over 5,000 amateur players worldwide who welcome partners for chamber music sessions.[78]
Regardless of whether the number of amateur players has grown or shrunk, the number of chamber music concerts in the west has increased greatly in the last 20 years. Concert halls have largely replaced the home as the venue for concerts. Baron suggests that one of the reasons for this surge is "the spiraling costs of orchestral concerts and the astronomical fees demanded by famous soloists, which have priced both out of the range of most audiences."[79] The repertoire at these concerts is almost universally the classics of the 19th century. However, modern works are increasingly included in programs, and some groups, like the Kronos Quartet, devote themselves almost exclusively to contemporary music and new compositions; and ensembles like the Turtle Island String Quartet, that combine classical, jazz, rock and other styles to create crossover music. Cello Fury and Project Trio offer a new spin to the standard chamber ensemble. Cello Fury consists of three cellists and a drummer and Project Trio includes a flutist, bassist, and cellist.
The Simple Measures ensemble on YouTube plays chamber music in a Seattle streetcar
Several groups such as Classical Revolution and Simple Measures have taken classical chamber music out of the concert hall and into the streets. Simple Measures, a group of chamber musicians in Seattle (Washington, US), gives concerts in shopping centers, coffee shops, and streetcars.[80] The Providence (Rhode Island, US) String Quartet has started the "Storefront Strings" program, offering impromptu concerts and lessons out of a storefront in one of Providence's poorer neighborhoods.[81] "What really makes this for me", said Rajan Krishnaswami, cellist and founder of Simple Measures, "is the audience reaction ... you really get that audience feedback."[82]
Performanceedit
Chamber music performance is a specialized field, and requires a number of skills not normally required for the performance of symphonic or solo music. Many performers and authors have written about the specialized techniques required for a successful chamber musician. Chamber music playing, writes M. D. Herter Norton, requires that "individuals ... make a unified whole yet remain individuals. The soloist is a whole unto himself, and in the orchestra individuality is lost in numbers ...".[83]
"Music of friends"edit
Chamber musicians going at each other, from "The Short-tempered Clavichord" by illustrator Robert Bonotto
Many performers contend that the intimate nature of chamber music playing requires certain personality traits.
David Waterman, cellist of the Endellion Quartet, writes that the chamber musician "needs to balance assertiveness and flexibility."[84] Good rapport is essential. Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, notes that many professional quartets suffer from frequent turnover of players. "Many musicians cannot take the strain of going mano a mano with the same three people year after year."[85]
Mary Norton, a violinist who studied quartet playing with the Kneisel Quartet at the beginning of the last century, goes so far that players of different parts in a quartet have different personality traits. "By tradition the first violin is the leader" but "this does not mean a relentless predominance." The second violinist "is a little everybody's servant." "The artistic contribution of each member will be measured by his skill in asserting or subduing that individuality which he must possess to be at all interesting."[86]
Interpretationedit
"For an individual, the problems of interpretation are challenging enough", writes Waterman, "but for a quartet grappling with some of the most profound, intimate and heartfelt compositions in the music literature, the communal nature of decision-making is often more testing than the decisions themselves."[87]
The problem of finding agreement on musical issues is complicated by the fact that each player is playing a different part, that may appear to demand dynamics or gestures contrary to those of other parts in the same passage. Sometimes these differences are even specified in the score – for example, where cross-dynamics are indicated, with one instrument crescendoing while another is getting softer.
One of the issues that must be settled in rehearsal is who leads the ensemble at each point of the piece. Normally, the first violin leads the ensemble. By leading, this means that the violinist indicates the start of each movement and their tempos by a gesture with her head or bowing hand. However, there are passages that require other instruments to lead. For example, John Dalley, second violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, says, "We'll often ask [the cellist] to lead in pizzicato passages. A cellist's preparatory motion for pizzicato is larger and slower than that of a violinist."[88]
Players discuss issues of interpretation in rehearsal; but often, in mid-performance, players do things spontaneously, requiring the other players to respond in real time. "After twenty years in the [Guarneri] Quartet, I'm happily surprised on occasion to find myself totally wrong about what I think a player will do, or how he'll react in a particular passage", says violist Michael Tree.[89]
Ensemble, blend, and balanceedit
A graphic interpretation of the Burletta movement of Bartók's String Quartet No. 6, by artist Joel Epstein
Playing together constitutes a major challenge to chamber music players. Many compositions pose difficulties in coordination, with figures such as hemiolas, syncopation, fast unison passages and simultaneously sounded notes that form chords that are challenging to play in tune. But beyond the challenge of merely playing together from a rhythmic or intonation perspective is the greater challenge of sounding good together.
To create a unified chamber music sound – to blend – the players must coordinate the details of their technique. They must decide when to use vibrato and how much. They often need to coordinate their bowing and "breathing" between phrases, to ensure a unified sound. They need to agree on special techniques, such as spiccato, sul tasto, sul ponticello, and so on.[90]
Balance refers to the relative volume of each of the instruments. Because chamber music is a conversation, sometimes one instrument must stand out, sometimes another. It is not always a simple matter for members of an ensemble to determine the proper balance while playing; frequently, they require an outside listener, or a recording of their rehearsal, to tell them that the relations between the instruments are correct.
Intonationedit
Chamber music playing presents special problems of intonation. The piano is tuned using equal temperament, that is, the 12 notes of the scale are spaced exactly equally. This method makes it possible for the piano to play in any key; however, all the intervals except the octave sound very slightly out of tune. String players can play with just intonation, that is, they can play specific intervals (such as fifths) exactly in tune. Moreover, string and wind players can use expressive intonation, changing the pitch of a note to create a musical or dramatic effect. "String intonation is more expressive and sensitive than equal-tempered piano intonation."[91]
However, using true and expressive intonation requires careful coordination with the other players, especially when a piece is going through harmonic modulations. "The difficulty in string quartet intonation is to determine the degree of freedom you have at any given moment", says Steinhardt.[92]
The chamber music experienceedit
Players of chamber music, both amateur and professional, attest to a unique enchantment with playing in ensemble. "It is not an exaggeration to say that there opened out before me an enchanted world", writes Walter Willson Cobbett, instigator of the Cobbett Competition, Cobbett Medal and editor of Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music.[93]
Ensembles develop a close intimacy of shared musical experience. "It is on the concert stage where the moments of true intimacy occur", writes Steinhardt. "When a performance is in progress, all four of us together enter a zone of magic somewhere between our music stands and become a conduit, messenger, and missionary ... It is an experience too personal to talk about and yet it colors every aspect of our relationship, every good-natured musical confrontation, all the professional gossip, the latest viola joke."[94]
The playing of chamber music has been the inspiration for numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction. An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, explores the life and love of the second violinist of a fictional quartet, the Maggiore. Central to the story is the tensions and the intimacy developed between the four members of the quartet. "A strange composite being we are [in performance], not ourselves any more, but the Maggiore, composed of so many disjunct parts: chairs, stands, music, bows, instruments, musicians ..."[95]The Rosendorf Quartet, by Nathan Shaham,[96] describes the trials of a string quartet in Palestine, before the establishment of the state of Israel. For the Love of It by Wayne Booth[97] is a nonfictional account of the author's romance with cello playing and chamber music.
Chamber music societiesedit
Numerous societies are dedicated to the encouragement and performance of chamber music. Some of these are:
the Associated Chamber Music Players, or ACMP – The Chamber Music Network, an international organization that encourages amateur and professional chamber music playing. ACMP has a fund to support chamber music projects, and publishes a directory of chamber musicians worldwide.
Chamber Music America supports professional chamber music groups through grants for residencies and commissions, through award programs, and through professional development programs.
the Cobbett Association for Chamber Music Research is an organization dedicated to the rediscovery of works of forgotten chamber music.
Music for the Love of It 2017-11-14 at the Wayback Machine publishes a newsletter on amateur chamber music activities worldwide, as well as a guide to music workshops for amateurs.
the Ottawa Chamber Music Society, a non-profit organization that encourages public involvement and appreciation of chamber music. The OCMS has organized Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, the largest chamber music festival in the world, since 1994.[98]
Musica Viva Australia, a large non-profit chamber music promoter working across Australia that tours local and international chamber music artists, as well as managing chamber music festivals and young artist development programs.
In addition to these national and international organizations, there are also numerous regional and local organizations that support chamber music. Some of the most prominent professional American chamber music ensembles and organizations are:
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center based in New York City
This is a partial list of the types of ensembles found in chamber music. The standard repertoire for chamber ensembles is rich, and the totality of chamber music in print in sheet music form is nearly boundless. See the articles on each instrument combination for examples of repertoire.
Common in baroque music predating the piano. The basso continuo part is always present to provide rhythm and accompaniment, and is often played by a harpsichord but other instruments can also be used. Contemporaneously, however, such a work was not called a "duo" but a "solo".
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms (original pieces and many transcriptions of his own works); a favorite domestic musical form, with many transcriptions of other genres (operas, symphonies, concertos and so on).
Mozart's Divertimento K. 563 is an important example; Beethoven composed 5 trios near the beginning of his career. 2 Vln and vla trios have been written by Dvořák, Bridge and Kodály.
20th-century composers such as Villa-Lobos have established this typical combination, also well suited to transcriptions of Mozart's Basset horn trios (if not to Beethoven's 2 ob. + English horn trio)
Mozart's KV 581, Brahms's Op. 115, Weber's Op. 34, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Op. 10, Hindemith's Quintet (in which the clarinet player must alternate between a B♭ and an E♭ instrument), Milton Babbitt's Clarinet Quintet, and many others.
cl, pno left hand, vn, va, vc
Schmidt's chamber pieces dedicated to the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (who played with the left hand only), although they are almost always performed nowadays in a two-hands version arranged by Friedrich Wührer.
Named after Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which was the first piece to demand this instrumentation. Other works include Joan Tower's Petroushkates, Sebastian Currier's Static, and Elliott Carter's Triple Duo. Some works, such as Pierrot Lunaire itself, augment the ensemble with voice or percussion.
Two string quartets arranged antiphonically. A genre preferred by Spohr. Milhaud's Op. 291 Octet is, rather, a couple of String Quartets (his 14th and 15th) performed simultaneously
2 ob, 2 English hrn, 2 cl, 2 hrn, 2 bsn (Mozart's set) or 2 fl, ob, Eng hrn, 2 cl, 2 hrn and 2 bsn (Enescu's set)
There are few double wind quintets written in the 18th century (notable exceptions being partitas by Josef Reicha and Antonio Rosetti), but in the 19th and 20th centuries they are plentiful. The most common instrumentation is 2 flutes (piccolo), 2 oboes (or English horn), two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons. Some of the best 19th-century compositions are the Émile Bernard Divertissement, Arthur Bird's Suite and the Salomon Jadassohn Serenade, to name a few. In the 20th century the Decet/dixtuor in D, Op. 14 by Enescu written in 1906, is a well-known example. Frequently an additional bass instrument is added to the standard double wind quintet. Over 500 works have been written for these instruments and related ones.[99]
^Christina Bashford, "The String Quartet and Society", in Stowell (2003), p. 4. The expression "music of friends" was first used by Richard Walthew in a lecture published in South Place Institute, London, in 1909.Walthew, Richard H. (1909). The Development of Chamber Music. London: Boosey. p. 42.
^Trio sonata from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079, by J. S. Bach, is from a performance in June 2001 by flutist Taka Konishi and Ensemble Brillante, at Faith Presbyterian Church in Detroit.
^Recording is by Caeli Smith and Ryan Shannon, violins, Nora Murphy, viola, and Nick Thompson and Rachel Grandstrand, celli
^For an analysis of these works, as well as the quintet, see Willi Kahl, "Schubert", in Cobbett (1929), pp. 352–364.
^Piano quintet Op. 44 by Robert Schumann, last movement, is played by Steans Artists of Musicians from Ravinia in concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Traffic.libsyn.com
^Ross, April Marie (August 2015). "A Guide to Arranging Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Harmoniemusik in an Historical Style". from the original on 2021-05-01.
^Lott, Marie S. (2008) Audience and style in nineteenth-century chamber music, c. 1830 to 1880. University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
^ abRadice, Mark A. (2012). Chamber music: An essential history. The University of Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. p. 115. ISBN978-0-472-02811-5.
^Bashford, Christina (2010). "Historiography and Invisible Musics: Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain". Journal of the American Musicological Society. 63 (2): 291–360. doi:10.1525/jams.2010.63.2.291. ISSN 0003-0139.
^Bashford, Christina (Summer 2010). "Historiography and Invisible Musics: Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain". Journal of the American Musicological Society. 63 (2): 291–360. doi:10.1525/jams.2010.63.2.291. JSTOR 10.1525/jams.2010.63.2.291.
^Theresa Schiavone, "Amateurs Help Keep Chamber Music Alive", All Things Considered, August 27, 2005, NPR
^Antoine Hennion, "Music industry and music lovers, beyond Benjamin: The return of the amateur", in Soundscapes (volume 2, July 1999) available online at Soundscapes.info.
^. musicfortheloveofit.com. Archived from the original on 2017-11-14. Retrieved 2017-12-12.
^"ACMP | The Chamber Music Network". acmp.net. Retrieved 2017-12-12.
McCalla, James (2003). Twentieth-Century Chamber Music. Routledge. ISBN0-4159-6695-7.
Miller, Lucy (2006). Adams to Zemlinsky. Concert Artists Guild. ISBN1-892862-09-3.
Norton, M. D. Herter (1925). The Art of String Quartet Playing. New York: Simon and Schuster (1962).
Raynor, Henry (1978). Social History of Music. Boston: Taplinger Publishing. ISBN9780800872380.
Schoenberg, Arnold (1984). Leonard Stein (ed.). Style and Ideal: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Ulrich, Homer (1966). Chamber Music. Columbia University Press. ISBN0-231-08617-2.
Winter, Robert; Martin, Robert, eds. (1994). The Beethoven Quartet Companion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN0-520-20420-4.
Sicca, Luigi Maria (2000). "Chamber music and organization theory: some typical organizational phenomena seen under the microscope". Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies. 6 (2). Taylor & Francis: 145–168. doi:10.1080/10245280008523545. ISSN 1024-5286. S2CID 145538145.
Sumner Lott, Marie (2015). The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities. University of Illinois Press. ISBN978-0-252-03922-5. Retrieved 12 February 2017.
Thompson, Oscar (1940). Debussy: Man and Artist. Tudor Publishing.
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chamber, music, kammermusik, redirects, here, works, hindemith, kammermusik, hindemith, chamber, piece, redirects, here, films, single, location, list, films, single, location, other, uses, disambiguation, form, classical, music, that, composed, small, group, . Kammermusik redirects here For the works by Hindemith see Kammermusik Hindemith Chamber piece redirects here For films set in a single location see List of films set in a single location For other uses see Chamber music disambiguation Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room Most broadly it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part in contrast to orchestral music in which each string part is played by a number of performers However by convention it usually does not include solo instrument performances Frederick the Great plays flute in his summer palace Sanssouci with Franz Benda playing violin Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach accompanying on keyboard and unidentified string players painting by Adolph Menzel 1850 52 Because of its intimate nature chamber music has been described as the music of friends 1 For more than 100 years chamber music was played primarily by amateur musicians in their homes and even today when chamber music performance has migrated from the home to the concert hall many musicians amateur and professional still play chamber music for their own pleasure Playing chamber music requires special skills both musical and social that differ from the skills required for playing solo or symphonic works 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe described chamber music specifically string quartet music as four rational people conversing 3 This conversational paradigm which refers to the way one instrument introduces a melody or motif and then other instruments subsequently respond with a similar motif has been a thread woven through the history of chamber music composition from the end of the 18th century to the present The analogy to conversation recurs in descriptions and analyses of chamber music compositions Contents 1 History 1 1 Early beginnings 1 2 Haydn Mozart and the classical style 1 3 From home to hall 1 3 1 Collapse of the aristocratic system 1 3 2 Changes in the structure of stringed instruments 1 3 3 Invention of the pianoforte 1 4 Beethoven 1 5 Franz Schubert 1 6 Felix Mendelssohn 1 7 Robert Schumann 1 8 Chamber music and society in the 19th century 1 9 Toward the 20th century 1 10 Nationalism in chamber music 1 11 New sounds for a new world 1 11 1 Inspiration from folk music 1 11 2 Serialism polytonality and polyrhythms 1 11 3 Neoclassicism 1 12 Stretching the limits 1 12 1 Music of friends 1 12 2 Relation of composer and performer 1 12 3 New sounds 1 13 In contemporary society 2 Performance 2 1 Music of friends 2 2 Interpretation 2 3 Ensemble blend and balance 2 4 Intonation 3 The chamber music experience 4 Chamber music societies 5 Festivals 6 Ensembles 7 Notes 7 1 Bibliography 8 Further reading 9 External linksHistory editFrom its earliest beginnings in the Medieval period to the present chamber music has been a reflection of the changes in the technology and the society that produced it Early beginnings edit nbsp Plato Aristotle Hippocrates and Galen play a piece on viols in this fanciful woodcut from 1516 During the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance instruments were used primarily as accompaniment for singers 4 String players would play along with the melody line sung by the singer There were also purely instrumental ensembles often of stringed precursors of the violin family called consorts 5 Some analysts consider the origin of classical instrumental ensembles to be the sonata da camera chamber sonata and the sonata da chiesa church sonata 6 These were compositions for one to five or more instruments The sonata da camera was a suite of slow and fast movements interspersed with dance tunes the sonata da chiesa was the same but the dances were omitted These forms gradually developed into the trio sonata of the Baroque two treble instruments and a bass instrument often with a keyboard or other chording instrument harpsichord organ harp or lute for example filling in the harmony 7 Both the bass instrument and the chordal instrument would play the basso continuo part During the Baroque period chamber music as a genre was not clearly defined Often works could be played on any variety of instruments in orchestral or chamber ensembles The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach for example can be played on a keyboard instrument harpsichord or organ or by a string quartet or a string orchestra The instrumentation of trio sonatas was also often flexibly specified some of Handel s sonatas are scored for German flute Hoboy oboe or Violin 8 Bass lines could be played by violone cello theorbo or bassoon and sometimes three or four instruments would join in the bass line in unison Sometimes composers mixed movements for chamber ensembles with orchestral movements Telemann s Tafelmusik 1733 for example has five sets of movements for various combinations of instruments ending with a full orchestral section 9 nbsp J S Bach Trio sonata on YouTube from The Musical Offering played by Ensemble Brillante 10 Baroque chamber music was often contrapuntal that is each instrument played the same melodic materials at different times creating a complex interwoven fabric of sound Because each instrument was playing essentially the same melodies all the instruments were equal In the trio sonata there is often no ascendent or solo instrument but all three instruments share equal importance nbsp Baroque musicians playing a trio sonata 18th century anonymous paintingThe harmonic role played by the keyboard or other chording instrument was subsidiary and usually the keyboard part was not even written out rather the chordal structure of the piece was specified by numeric codes over the bass line called figured bass In the second half of the 18th century tastes began to change many composers preferred a new lighter Galant style with thinner texture and clearly defined melody and bass to the complexities of counterpoint 11 Now a new custom arose that gave birth to a new form of chamber music the serenade Patrons invited street musicians to play evening concerts below the balconies of their homes their friends and their lovers Patrons and musicians commissioned composers to write suitable suites of dances and tunes for groups of two to five or six players These works were called serenades nocturnes divertimenti or cassations from gasse street The young Joseph Haydn was commissioned to write several of these 12 Haydn Mozart and the classical style edit Joseph Haydn is generally credited with creating the modern form of chamber music as we know it 13 although scholars today such as Roger Hickman argue the idea that Haydn invented the string quartet and single handedly advanced the genre is based on only a vague notion of the true history of the eighteenth century genre 14 A typical string quartet of the period would consist of An opening movement in sonata form usually with two contrasting themes followed by a development section where the thematic material is transformed and transposed and ending with a recapitulation of the initial two themes A lyrical movement in a slow or moderate tempo sometimes built out of three sections that repeat themselves in the order A B C A B C and sometimes a set of variations A minuet or scherzo a light movement in three quarter time with a main section a contrasting trio section and a repeat of the main section A fast finale section in rondo form a series of contrasting sections with a main refrain section opening and closing the movement and repeating between each section Haydn was by no means the only composer developing new modes of chamber music Even before Haydn many composers were already experimenting with new forms Giovanni Battista Sammartini Ignaz Holzbauer and Franz Xaver Richter wrote precursors of the string quartet Franz Ignaz von Beecke 1733 1803 with his Piano Quintet in A minor 1770 and 17 string quartets was also one of the pioneers of chamber music of the Classical period Another renowned composer of chamber music of the period was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Mozart s seven piano trios and two piano quartets were the first to apply the conversational principle to chamber music with piano Haydn s piano trios are essentially piano sonatas with the violin and cello playing mostly supporting roles doubling the treble and bass lines of the piano score But Mozart gives the strings an independent role using them as a counter to the piano and adding their individual voices to the chamber music conversation 15 nbsp Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart String Quintet No 4 K 516 First movement source source played by Roxana Pavel Goldstein Elizabeth Choi violins Elias Goldstein Sally Chisholm violas Jocelyn Butler cello Problems playing this file See media help Mozart introduced the newly invented clarinet into the chamber music arsenal with the Kegelstatt Trio for viola clarinet and piano K 498 and the Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet K 581 He also tried other innovative ensembles including the quintet for violin two violas cello and horn K 407 quartets for flute and strings and various wind instrument combinations He wrote six string quintets for two violins two violas and cello which explore the rich tenor tones of the violas adding a new dimension to the string quartet conversation Mozart s string quartets are considered the pinnacle of the classical art The six string quartets that he dedicated to Haydn his friend and mentor inspired the elder composer to say to Mozart s father I tell you before God as an honest man that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by reputation He has taste and what is more the most profound knowledge of composition 16 Many other composers wrote chamber compositions during this period that were popular at the time and are still played today Luigi Boccherini Italian composer and cellist wrote nearly a hundred string quartets and more than one hundred quintets for two violins viola and two cellos In this innovative ensemble later used by Schubert Boccherini gives flashy virtuosic solos to the principal cello as a showcase for his own playing Violinist Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and cellist Johann Baptist Wanhal who both played pickup quartets with Haydn on second violin and Mozart on viola were popular chamber music composers of the period From home to hall edit nbsp Copy of a pianoforte from 1805The turn of the 19th century saw dramatic changes in society and in music technology which had far reaching effects on the way chamber music was composed and played Collapse of the aristocratic system edit Throughout the 18th century the composer was normally an employee of an aristocrat and the chamber music he or she composed was for the pleasure of aristocratic players and listeners 17 Haydn for example was an employee of Nikolaus I Prince Esterhazy a music lover and amateur baryton player for whom Haydn wrote many of his string trios Mozart wrote three string quartets for the King of Prussia Frederick William II a cellist Many of Beethoven s quartets were first performed with patron Count Andrey Razumovsky on second violin Boccherini composed for the king of Spain With the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of new social orders throughout Europe composers increasingly had to make money by selling their compositions and performing concerts They often gave subscription concerts which involved renting a hall and collecting the receipts from the performance Increasingly they wrote chamber music not only for rich patrons but for professional musicians playing for a paying audience Changes in the structure of stringed instruments edit At the beginning of the 19th century luthiers developed new methods of constructing the violin viola and cello that gave these instruments a richer tone more volume and more carrying power 18 Also at this time bowmakers made the violin bow longer with a thicker ribbon of hair under higher tension This improved projection and also made possible new bowing techniques In 1820 Louis Spohr invented the chinrest which gave violinists more freedom of movement in their left hands for a more nimble technique These changes contributed to the effectiveness of public performances in large halls and expanded the repertoire of techniques available to chamber music composers Invention of the pianoforte edit Throughout the Baroque era the harpsichord was one of the main instruments used in chamber music The harpsichord used quills to pluck strings and it had a delicate sound Due to the design of the harpsichord the attack or weight with which the performer played the keyboard did not change the volume or tone Between about 1750 and the late 1700s the harpsichord gradually fell out of use By the late 1700s the pianoforte became more popular as an instrument for performance Even though the pianoforte was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori at the beginning of the 1700s it did not become widely used until the end of that century when technical improvements in its construction made it a more effective instrument Unlike the harpsichord the pianoforte could play soft or loud dynamics and sharp sforzando attacks depending on how hard or soft the performer played the keys 19 The improved pianoforte was adopted by Mozart and other composers who began composing chamber ensembles with the piano playing a leading role The piano was to become more and more dominant through the 19th century so much so that many composers such as Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin wrote almost exclusively for solo piano or solo piano with orchestra Beethoven edit Ludwig van Beethoven straddled this period of change as a giant of Western music Beethoven transformed chamber music raising it to a new plane both in terms of content and in terms of the technical demands on performers and audiences His works in the words of Maynard Solomon were the models against which nineteenth century romanticism measured its achievements and failures 20 His late quartets in particular were considered so daunting an accomplishment that many composers after him were afraid to try composing quartets Johannes Brahms composed and tore up 20 string quartets before he dared publish a work that he felt was worthy of the giant marching behind 21 nbsp Manuscript of the Ghost Trio Op 70 No 1 by BeethovenBeethoven made his formal debut as a composer with three Piano Trios Op 1 Even these early works written when Beethoven was only 22 while adhering to a strictly classical mold showed signs of the new paths that Beethoven was to forge in the coming years When he showed the manuscript of the trios to Haydn his teacher prior to publication Haydn approved of the first two but warned against publishing the third trio in C minor as too radical warning it would not be understood and favorably received by the public 22 Haydn was wrong the third trio was the most popular of the set and Haydn s criticisms caused a falling out between him and the sensitive Beethoven The trio is indeed a departure from the mold that Haydn and Mozart had formed Beethoven makes dramatic deviations of tempo within phrases and within movements He greatly increases the independence of the strings especially the cello allowing it to range above the piano and occasionally even the violin If his Op 1 trios introduced Beethoven s works to the public his Septet Op 20 established him as one of Europe s most popular composers The septet scored for violin viola cello contrabass clarinet horn and bassoon was a huge hit It was played in concerts again and again It appeared in transcriptions for many combinations one of which for clarinet cello and piano was written by Beethoven himself and was so popular that Beethoven feared it would eclipse his other works So much so that by 1815 Carl Czerny wrote that Beethoven could not endure his septet and grew angry because of the universal applause which it has received 23 The septet is written as a classical divertimento in six movements including two minuets and a set of variations It is full of catchy tunes with solos for everyone including the contrabass nbsp Beethoven Septet Op 20 first movement played by the Ensemble Mediterrain In his 17 string quartets composed over the course of 37 of his 56 years Beethoven goes from classical composer par excellence to creator of musical Romanticism and finally with his late string quartets he transcends classicism and romanticism to create a genre that defies categorization Stravinsky referred to the Grosse Fuge of the late quartets as this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever 24 The string quartets 1 6 Op 18 were written in the classical style in the same year that Haydn wrote his Op 76 string quartets Even here Beethoven stretched the formal structures pioneered by Haydn and Mozart In the quartet Op 18 No 1 in F major for example there is a long lyrical solo for cello in the second movement giving the cello a new type of voice in the quartet conversation And the last movement of Op 18 No 6 La Malincolia creates a new type of formal structure interleaving a slow melancholic section with a manic dance Beethoven was to use this form in later quartets and Brahms and others adopted it as well Beethoven Quartet Op 59 No 3 played by the Modigliani Quartet Piano Trio Op 70 No 1 Ghost played by the Claremont Trio In the years 1805 to 1806 Beethoven composed the three Op 59 quartets on a commission from Count Razumovsky who played second violin in their first performance These quartets from Beethoven s middle period were pioneers in the romantic style Besides introducing many structural and stylistic innovations these quartets were much more difficult technically to perform so much so that they were and remain beyond the reach of many amateur string players When first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh complained of their difficulty Beethoven retorted Do you think I care about your wretched violin when the spirit moves me 25 Among the difficulties are complex syncopations and cross rhythms synchronized runs of sixteenth thirty second and sixty fourth notes and sudden modulations requiring special attention to intonation In addition to the Op 59 quartets Beethoven wrote two more quartets during his middle period Op 74 the Harp quartet named for the unusual harp like effect Beethoven creates with pizzicato passages in the first movement and Op 95 the Serioso The Serioso is a transitional work that ushers in Beethoven s late period a period of compositions of great introspection The particular kind of inwardness of Beethoven s last style period writes Joseph Kerman gives one the feeling that the music is sounding only for the composer and for one other auditor an awestruck eavesdropper you 26 In the late quartets the quartet conversation is often disjointed proceeding like a stream of consciousness Melodies are broken off or passed in the middle of the melodic line from instrument to instrument Beethoven uses new effects never before essayed in the string quartet literature the ethereal dreamlike effect of open intervals between the high E string and the open A string in the second movement of quartet Op 132 the use of sul ponticello playing on the bridge of the violin for a brittle scratchy sound in the Presto movement of Op 131 the use of the Lydian mode rarely heard in Western music for 200 years in Op 132 a cello melody played high above all the other strings in the finale of Op 132 27 Yet for all this disjointedness each quartet is tightly designed with an overarching structure that ties the work together Beethoven wrote eight piano trios five string trios two string quintets and numerous pieces for wind ensemble He also wrote ten sonatas for violin and piano and five sonatas for cello and piano Franz Schubert edit nbsp Schubert Octet source source D 803 first movement performed on period instruments Problems playing this file See media help As Beethoven in his last quartets went off in his own direction Franz Schubert carried on and established the emerging romantic style In his 31 years Schubert devoted much of his life to chamber music composing 15 string quartets two piano trios string trios a piano quintet commonly known as the Trout Quintet an octet for strings and winds and his famous quintet for two violins viola and two cellos nbsp Franz Schubert Trout Quintet D 667 performed by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Schubert on YouTube String Quintet in C D 956 first movement recorded at the Fredonia Quartet Program July 2008 Schubert s music as his life exemplified the contrasts and contradictions of his time On the one hand he was the darling of Viennese society he starred in soirees that became known as Schubertiaden where he played his light mannered compositions that expressed the gemutlichkeit of Vienna of the 1820s On the other hand his own short life was shrouded in tragedy wracked by poverty and ill health Chamber music was the ideal medium to express this conflict to reconcile his essentially lyric themes with his feeling for dramatic utterance within a form that provided the possibility of extreme color contrasts 28 The String Quintet in C D 956 is an example of how this conflict is expressed in music After a slow introduction the first theme of the first movement fiery and dramatic leads to a bridge of rising tension peaking suddenly and breaking into the second theme a lilting duet in the lower voices 29 The alternating Sturm und Drang and relaxation continue throughout the movement These contending forces are expressed in some of Schubert s other works in the quartet Death and the Maiden the Rosamunde quartet and in the stormy one movement Quartettsatz D 703 30 Felix Mendelssohn edit See also List of compositions by Felix Mendelssohn Chamber music nbsp Mendelssohn String quartet Op 13 source source third movement by the Carmel Quartet Problems playing this file See media help Unlike Schubert Felix Mendelssohn had a life of peace and prosperity Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg Mendelssohn proved himself a child prodigy By the age of 16 he had written his first major chamber work the String Octet Op 20 Already in this work Mendelssohn showed some of the unique style that was to characterize his later works notably the gossamer light texture of his scherzo movements exemplified also by the Canzonetta movement of the String Quartet Op 12 and the scherzo of the Piano Trio No 1 in D minor Op 49 Another characteristic that Mendelssohn pioneered is the cyclic form in overall structure This means the reuse of thematic material from one movement to the next to give the total piece coherence In his second string quartet he opens the piece with a peaceful adagio section in A major that contrasts with the stormy first movement in A minor After the final vigorous Presto movement he returns to the opening adagio to conclude the piece This string quartet is also Mendelssohn s homage to Beethoven the work is studded with quotes from Beethoven s middle and late quartets nbsp Violinist Joseph Joachim and pianist Clara Schumann Joachim and Schumann debuted many of the chamber works of Robert Schumann Johannes Brahms and others During his adult life Mendelssohn wrote two piano trios seven works for string quartet two string quintets the octet a sextet for piano and strings and numerous sonatas for piano with violin cello and clarinet Robert Schumann edit nbsp Cyclic structure in the Schumann piano quintet source source Problems playing this file See media help Robert Schumann continued the development of cyclic structure In his Piano Quintet in E flat Op 44 31 Schumann wrote a double fugue in the finale using the theme of the first movement and the theme of the last movement Both Schumann and Mendelssohn following the example set by Beethoven revived the fugue which had fallen out of favor since the Baroque period However rather than writing strict full length fugues they used counterpoint as another mode of conversation between the chamber music instruments Many of Schumann s chamber works including all three of his string quartets and his piano quartet have contrapuntal sections interwoven seamlessly into the overall compositional texture 32 The composers of the first half of the 19th century were acutely aware of the conversational paradigm established by Haydn and Mozart Schumann wrote that in a true quartet everyone has something to say a conversation often truly beautiful often oddly and turbidly woven among four people 33 Their awareness is exemplified by composer and virtuoso violinist Louis Spohr Spohr divided his 36 string quartets into two types the quatuor brillant essentially a violin concerto with string trio accompaniment and quatuor dialogue in the conversational tradition 34 Chamber music and society in the 19th century edit nbsp Home music making in the 19th century painting by Jules Alexandre Grun During the 19th century with the rise of new technology driven by the Industrial Revolution printed music became cheaper and thus more accessible while domestic music making gained widespread popularity Composers began to incorporate new elements and techniques into their works to appeal to this open market since there was an increased consumer desire for chamber music 35 While improvements in instruments led to more public performances of chamber music it remained very much a type of music to be played as much as performed Amateur quartet societies sprang up throughout Europe and no middling sized city in Germany or France was without one These societies sponsored house concerts compiled music libraries and encouraged the playing of quartets and other ensembles 36 In European countries in particular Germany and France like minded musicians were brought together and started to develop a strong connection with the community Composers were in high favor with orchestral works and solo virtuosi works which made up the largest part of the public concert repertoire 37 Early French composers including Camille Saint Saens and Cesar Franck 38 Apart from the central Austro Germanic countries there was an occurrence of the subculture of chamber music in other regions such as Britain There chamber music was often performed by upper and middle class men with less advanced musical skills in an unexpected setting such as informal ensembles in private residence with few audience members 39 In Britain the most common form of chamber music compositions are the string quartets sentimental songs and piano chamber works like the piano trio in a way depicts the standard conception of the conventional Victorian music making 40 In the middle of the 19th century with the rise of the feminist movement women also started to receive acceptability to be participated in chamber music Thousands of quartets were published by hundreds of composers between 1770 and 1800 more than 2000 quartets were published 41 and the pace did not decline in the next century Throughout the 19th century composers published string quartets now long neglected George Onslow wrote 36 quartets and 35 quintets Gaetano Donizetti wrote dozens of quartets Antonio Bazzini Anton Reicha Carl Reissiger Joseph Suk and others wrote to fill an insatiable demand for quartets In addition there was a lively market for string quartet arrangements of popular and folk tunes piano works symphonies and opera arias 42 But opposing forces were at work The middle of the 19th century saw the rise of superstar virtuosi who drew attention away from chamber music toward solo performance The piano which could be mass produced became an instrument of preference and many composers like Chopin and Liszt composed primarily if not exclusively for piano 43 nbsp Vilemina Norman Neruda leading a string quartet about 1880The ascendance of the piano and of symphonic composition was not merely a matter of preference it was also a matter of ideology In the 1860s a schism grew among romantic musicians over the direction of music Many composers tend to express their romantic persona through their works By the time these chamber works are not necessarily dedicated for any specific dedicatee Famous chamber works such as Fanny Mendelssohn D minor Piano Trio Ludwig van Beethoven s Trio in E flat major and Franz Schubert s Piano Quintet in A major are all highly personal 38 Liszt and Richard Wagner led a movement that contended that pure music had run its course with Beethoven and that new programmatic forms of music in which music created images with its melodies were the future of the art The composers of this school had no use for chamber music Opposing this view was Johannes Brahms and his associates especially the powerful music critic Eduard Hanslick This War of the Romantics shook the artistic world of the period with vituperative exchanges between the two camps concert boycotts and petitions Although amateur playing thrived throughout the 19th century this was also a period of increasing professionalization of chamber music performance Professional quartets began to dominate the chamber music concert stage The Hellmesberger Quartet led by Joseph Hellmesberger and the Joachim Quartet led by Joseph Joachim debuted many of the new string quartets by Brahms and other composers Another famous quartet player was Vilemina Norman Neruda also known as Lady Halle Indeed during the last third of the century women performers began taking their place on the concert stage an all women string quartet led by Emily Shinner and the Lucas quartet also all women were two notable examples 44 Toward the 20th century edit nbsp The Joachim Quartet led by violinist Joseph Joachim The quartet debuted many of the works of Johannes Brahms It was Johannes Brahms who carried the torch of Romantic music toward the 20th century Heralded by Robert Schumann as the forger of new paths in music 45 Brahms s music is a bridge from the classical to the modern On the one hand Brahms was a traditionalist conserving the musical traditions of Bach and Mozart 46 Throughout his chamber music he uses traditional techniques of counterpoint incorporating fugues and canons into rich conversational and harmonic textures On the other hand Brahms expanded the structure and the harmonic vocabulary of chamber music challenging traditional notions of tonality An example of this is in the Brahms second string sextet Op 36 47 Traditionally composers wrote the first theme of a piece in the key of the piece firmly establishing that key as the tonic or home key of the piece The opening theme of Op 36 starts in the tonic G major but already by the third measure has modulated to the unrelated key of E flat major As the theme develops it ranges through various keys before coming back to the tonic G major This harmonic audacity as Swafford describes it 48 opened the way for bolder experiments to come nbsp Brahms sextet Op 36 played by the Borromeo Quartet and Liz Freivogel and Daniel McDonough of the Jupiter String Quartet nbsp Brahms Clarinet Quintet Op 115 source source First movement performed by William McColl and the Orford String Quartet Problems playing this file See media help Not only in harmony but also in overall musical structure Brahms was an innovator He developed a technique that Arnold Schoenberg described as developing variation 49 Rather than discretely defined phrases Brahms often runs phrase into phrase and mixes melodic motives to create a fabric of continuous melody Schoenberg the creator of the 12 tone system of composition traced the roots of his modernism to Brahms in his essay Brahms the Progressive 50 All told Brahms published 24 works of chamber music including three string quartets five piano trios the quintet for piano and strings Op 34 and other works Among his last works were the clarinet quintet Op 115 and a trio for clarinet cello and piano He wrote a trio for the unusual combination of piano violin and horn Op 40 He also wrote two songs for alto singer viola and piano Op 91 reviving the form of voice with string obbligato that had been virtually abandoned since the Baroque nbsp The Seine at Lavacourt by Claude Monet Impressionist music and art sought similar effects of the ethereal atmospheric The exploration of tonality and of structure begun by Brahms was continued by composers of the French school Cesar Franck s piano quintet in F minor composed in 1879 further established the cyclic form first explored by Schumann and Mendelssohn reusing the same thematic material in each of the three movements Claude Debussy s string quartet Op 10 is considered a watershed in the history of chamber music The quartet uses the cyclic structure and constitutes a final divorce from the rules of classical harmony Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity Debussy wrote 51 Pierre Boulez said that Debussy freed chamber music from rigid structure frozen rhetoric and rigid aesthetics 51 nbsp Debussy String Quartet on YouTube first movement played by the Cypress String Quartet Debussy s quartet like the string quartets of Maurice Ravel and of Gabriel Faure created a new tone color for chamber music a color and texture associated with the Impressionist movement 52 Violist James Dunham of the Cleveland and Sequoia Quartets writes of the Ravel quartet I was simply overwhelmed by the sweep of sonority the sensation of colors constantly changing 53 For these composers chamber ensembles were the ideal vehicle for transmitting this atmospheric sense and chamber works constituted much of their oeuvre Nationalism in chamber music edit nbsp The Kneisel String Quartet led by Franz Kneisel This American ensemble debuted Dvorak s American Quartet Op 96 Parallel with the trend to seek new modes of tonality and texture was another new development in chamber music the rise of nationalism Composers turned more and more to the rhythms and tonalities of their native lands for inspiration and material Europe was impelled by the Romantic tendency to establish in musical matters the national boundaries more and more sharply wrote Alfred Einstein The collecting and sifting of old traditional melodic treasures formed the basis for a creative art music 54 For many of these composers chamber music was the natural vehicle for expressing their national characters nbsp Dvorak piano quintet Op 81 played by the Lincoln Center Chamber Players Czech composer Antonin Dvorak created in his chamber music a new voice for the music of his native Bohemia In 14 string quartets three string quintets two piano quartets a string sextet four piano trios and numerous other chamber compositions Dvorak incorporates folk music and modes as an integral part of his compositions For example in the piano quintet in A major Op 81 the slow movement is a Dumka a Slavic folk ballad that alternates between a slow expressive song and a fast dance Dvorak s fame in establishing a national art music was so great that the New York philanthropist and music connoisseur Jeannette Thurber invited him to America to head a conservatory that would establish an American style of music 55 There Dvorak wrote his string quartet in F major Op 96 nicknamed The American While composing the work Dvorak was entertained by a group of Kickapoo Indians who performed native dances and songs and these songs may have been incorporated in the quartet 56 Bedrich Smetana another Czech wrote a piano trio and string quartet both of which incorporate native Czech rhythms and melodies In Russia Russian folk music permeated the works of the late 19th century composers Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky uses a typical Russian folk dance in the final movement of his string sextet Souvenir de Florence Op 70 Alexander Borodin s second string quartet contains references to folk music and the slow Nocturne movement of that quartet recalls Middle Eastern modes that were current in the Muslim sections of southern Russia Edvard Grieg used the musical style of his native Norway in his string quartet in G minor Op 27 and his violin sonatas In Hungary composers Zoltan Kodaly and Bela Bartok pioneered the science of ethnomusicology by performing one of the first comprehensive studies of folk music Ranging across the Magyar provinces they transcribed recorded and classified tens of thousands of folk melodies 57 They used these tunes in their compositions which are characterized by the asymmetrical rhythms and modal harmonies of that music Their chamber music compositions and those of the Czech composer Leos Janacek combined the nationalist trend with the 20th century search for new tonalities Janacek s string quartets not only incorporate the tonalities of Czech folk music they also reflect the rhythms of speech in Czech New sounds for a new world edit The end of western tonality begun subtly by Brahms and made explicit by Debussy posed a crisis for composers of the 20th century It was not merely an issue of finding new types of harmonies and melodic systems to replace the diatonic scale that was the basis of western harmony the whole structure of western music the relationships between movements and between structural elements within movements was based on the relationships between different keys 58 So composers were challenged with building a whole new structure for music This was coupled with the feeling that the era that saw the invention of automobiles the telephone electric lighting and world war needed new modes of expression The century of the aeroplane deserves its music wrote Debussy 59 Inspiration from folk music edit nbsp Bela Bartok recording folksongs of Czech peasants 1908The search for a new music took several directions The first led by Bartok was toward the tonal and rhythmic constructs of folk music Bartok s research into Hungarian and other eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music revealed to him a musical world built of musical scales that were neither major nor minor and complex rhythms that were alien to the concert hall In his fifth quartet for example Bartok uses a time signature of 3 2 2 38 startling to the classically trained musician but second nature to the folk musician 60 Structurally also Bartok often invents or borrows from folk modes In the sixth string quartet for example Bartok begins each movement with a slow elegiac melody followed by the main melodic material of the movement and concludes the quartet with a slow movement that is built entirely on this elegy This is a form common in many folk music cultures nbsp Bartok string quartet number 2 second movement source source Played by the Carmel Quartet Problems playing this file See media help Bartok s six string quartets are often compared with Beethoven s late quartets 61 In them Bartok builds new musical structures explores sonorities never previously produced in classical music for example the snap pizzicato where the player lifts the string and lets it snap back on the fingerboard with an audible buzz and creates modes of expression that set these works apart from all others Bartok s last two quartets proclaim the sanctity of life progress and the victory of humanity despite the anti humanistic dangers of the time writes analyst John Herschel Baron 62 The last quartet written when Bartok was preparing to flee the Nazi invasion of Hungary for a new and uncertain life in the U S is often seen as an autobiographical statement of the tragedy of his times Bartok was not alone in his explorations of folk music Igor Stravinsky s Three Pieces for String Quartet is structured as three Russian folksongs rather than as a classical string quartet Stravinsky like Bartok used asymmetrical rhythms throughout his chamber music the Histoire du soldat in Stravinsky s own arrangement for clarinet violin and piano constantly shifts time signatures between two three four and five beats to the bar In Britain composers Ralph Vaughan Williams William Walton and Benjamin Britten drew on English folk music for much of their chamber music Vaughan Williams incorporates folksongs and country fiddling in his first string quartet American composer Charles Ives wrote music that was distinctly American Ives gave programmatic titles to much of his chamber music his first string quartet for example is called From the Salvation Army and quotes American Protestant hymns in several places Serialism polytonality and polyrhythms edit nbsp Painting of Pierrot the object of Schoenberg s atonal suite Pierrot Lunaire painted by Antoine WatteauA second direction in the search for a new tonality was twelve tone serialism Arnold Schoenberg developed the twelve tone method of composition as an alternative to the structure provided by the diatonic system His method entails building a piece using a series of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale permuting it and superimposing it on itself to create the composition nbsp Arnold Schoenberg Second string quartet fourth movement source source Played by the Carmel Quartet with soprano Rona Israel Kolatt This is the first explicitly atonal piece Problems playing this file See media help Schoenberg did not arrive immediately at the serial method His first chamber work the string sextet Verklarte Nacht was mostly a late German romantic work though it was bold in its use of modulations The first work that was frankly atonal was the second string quartet the last movement of this quartet which includes a soprano has no key signature Schoenberg further explored atonality with Pierrot Lunaire for singer flute or piccolo clarinet violin cello and piano The singer uses a technique called Sprechstimme halfway between speech and song After developing the twelve tone technique Schoenberg wrote a number of chamber works including two more string quartets a string trio and a wind quintet He was followed by a number of other twelve tone composers the most prominent of whom were his students Alban Berg who wrote the Lyric Suite for string quartet and Anton Webern who wrote Five Movements for String Quartet op 5 Twelve tone technique was not the only new experiment in tonality Darius Milhaud developed the use of polytonality that is music where different instruments play in different keys at the same time Milhaud wrote 18 string quartets quartets number 14 and 15 are written so that each can be played by itself or the two can be played at the same time as an octet Milhaud also used jazz idioms as in his Suite for clarinet violin and piano The American composer Charles Ives used not only polytonality in his chamber works but also polymeter In his first string quartet he writes a section where the first violin and viola play in 34 displaystyle tfrac 3 4 nbsp time while the second violin and cello play in 44 displaystyle tfrac 4 4 nbsp Neoclassicism edit The plethora of directions that music took in the first quarter of the 20th century led to a reaction by many composers Led by Stravinsky these composers looked to the music of preclassical Europe for inspiration and stability While Stravinsky s neoclassical works such as the Double Canon for String Quartet sound contemporary they are modeled on Baroque and early classical forms the canon the fugue and the Baroque sonata form nbsp Hindemith String Quartet 3 in C Op 22 on YouTube second movement Schnelle Achtel played by Ana Farmer David Boyden Austin Han and Dylan Mattingly Paul Hindemith was another neoclassicist His many chamber works are essentially tonal though they use many dissonant harmonies Hindemith wrote seven string quartets and two string trios among other chamber works At a time when composers were writing works of increasing complexity beyond the reach of amateur musicians Hindemith explicitly recognized the importance of amateur music making and intentionally wrote pieces that were within the abilities of nonprofessional players 63 The works that the composer summarised as Kammermusik a collection of eight extended compositions consists mostly of concertante works comparable to Bach s Brandenburg Concertos nbsp Dmitri Shostakovitch String quartet no 8 on YouTube Largo Allegro molto played by the Seraphina String Quartet Sabrina Tabby and Caeli Smith violins Madeline Smith viola Genevieve Tabby cello Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the most prolific of chamber music composers of the 20th century writing 15 string quartets two piano trios the piano quintet and numerous other chamber works Shostakovich s music was for a long time banned in the Soviet Union and Shostakovich himself was in personal danger of deportation to Siberia His eighth quartet is an autobiographical work that expresses his deep depression from his ostracization bordering on suicide 64 it quotes from previous compositions and uses the four note motif DSCH the composer s initials Stretching the limits edit As the century progressed many composers created works for small ensembles that while they formally might be considered chamber music challenged many of the fundamental characteristics that had defined the genre over the last 150 years Music of friends edit The idea of composing music that could be played at home has been largely abandoned Bartok was among the first to part with this idea Bartok never conceived these quartets for private performance but rather for large public concerts 62 Aside from the many almost insurmountable technical difficulties of many modern pieces some of them are hardly suitable for performance in a small room For example Different Trains by Steve Reich is scored for live string quartet and recorded tape which layers together a carefully orchestrated sound collage of speech recorded train sounds and three string quartets 65 nbsp Leon Theremin performing a trio for voice piano and theremin 1924Relation of composer and performer edit Traditionally the composer wrote the notes and the performer interpreted them But this is no longer the case in much modern music In Fur kommende Zeiten For Times to Come Stockhausen writes verbal instructions describing what the performers are to play Star constellations with common points and falling stars Abrupt end is a sample 66 Composer Terry Riley describes how he works with the Kronos Quartet an ensemble devoted to contemporary music When I write a score for them it s an unedited score I put in just a minimal amount of dynamics and phrasing marks we spend a lot of time trying out different ideas in order to shape the music to form it At the end of the process it makes the performers actually own the music That to me is the best way for composers and musicians to interact 67 New sounds edit Composers seek new timbres remote from the traditional blend of strings piano and woodwinds that characterized chamber music in the 19th century This search led to the incorporation of new instruments in the 20th century such as the theremin and the synthesizer in chamber music compositions Many composers sought new timbres within the framework of traditional instruments Composers begin to hear new timbres and new timbral combinations which are as important to the new music of the twentieth century as the so called breakdown of functional tonality writes music historian James McCalla 68 Examples are numerous Bartok s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion 1937 Schoenberg s Pierrot lunaire Charles Ives s Quartertone Pieces for two pianos tuned a quartertone apart Other composers used electronics and extended techniques to create new sonorities An example is George Crumb s Black Angels for electric string quartet 1970 The players not only bow their amplified instruments they also beat on them with thimbles pluck them with paper clips and play on the wrong side of the bridge or between the fingers and the nut 69 Still other composers have sought to explore the timbres created by including instruments which are not often associated with a typical orchestral ensemble For example Robert Davine explores the orchestral timbres of the accordion when it is included in a traditional wind trio in his Divertimento for accordion flute clarinet and bassoon 70 and Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote a Helicopter String Quartet 71 nbsp Excerpt from Bartok s Sonata for two pianos and percussion source source Problems playing this file See media help What do these changes mean for the future of chamber music With the technological advances have come questions of aesthetics and sociological changes in music writes analyst Baron 72 These changes have often resulted in accusations that technology has destroyed chamber music and that technological advance is in inverse proportion to musical worth The ferocity of these attacks only underscores how fundamental these changes are and only time will tell if humankind will benefit from them In contemporary society edit Analysts agree that the role of chamber music in society has changed profoundly in the last 50 years yet there is little agreement as to what that change is On the one hand Baron contends that chamber music in the home remained very important in Europe and America until the Second World War after which the increasing invasion of radio and recording reduced its scope considerably 73 This view is supported by subjective impressions Today there are so many more millions of people listening to music but far fewer playing chamber music just for the pleasure of it says conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim 74 nbsp Amateurs play a string sextetHowever recent surveys suggest there is on the contrary a resurgence of home music making In the radio program Amateurs Help Keep Chamber Music Alive from 2005 reporter Theresa Schiavone cites a Gallup poll showing an increase in the sale of stringed instruments in America Joe Lamond president of the National Association of Music Manufacturers NAMM attributes the increase to a growth of home music making by adults approaching retirement I would really look to the demographics of the baby boomers he said in an interview These people are starting to look for something that matters to them nothing makes them feel good more than playing music 75 A study by the European Music Office in 1996 suggests that not only older people are playing music The number of adolescents today to have done music has almost doubled by comparison with those born before 1960 the study shows 76 While most of this growth is in popular music some is in chamber music and art music according to the study While there is no agreement about the number of chamber music players the opportunities for amateurs to play have certainly grown The number of chamber music camps and retreats where amateurs can meet for a weekend or a month to play together has burgeoned Music for the Love of It an organization to promote amateur playing publishes a directory of music workshops that lists more than 500 workshops in 24 countries for amateurs in 2008 77 The Associated Chamber Music Players ACMP offers a directory of over 5 000 amateur players worldwide who welcome partners for chamber music sessions 78 Regardless of whether the number of amateur players has grown or shrunk the number of chamber music concerts in the west has increased greatly in the last 20 years Concert halls have largely replaced the home as the venue for concerts Baron suggests that one of the reasons for this surge is the spiraling costs of orchestral concerts and the astronomical fees demanded by famous soloists which have priced both out of the range of most audiences 79 The repertoire at these concerts is almost universally the classics of the 19th century However modern works are increasingly included in programs and some groups like the Kronos Quartet devote themselves almost exclusively to contemporary music and new compositions and ensembles like the Turtle Island String Quartet that combine classical jazz rock and other styles to create crossover music Cello Fury and Project Trio offer a new spin to the standard chamber ensemble Cello Fury consists of three cellists and a drummer and Project Trio includes a flutist bassist and cellist The Simple Measures ensemble on YouTube plays chamber music in a Seattle streetcar Several groups such as Classical Revolution and Simple Measures have taken classical chamber music out of the concert hall and into the streets Simple Measures a group of chamber musicians in Seattle Washington US gives concerts in shopping centers coffee shops and streetcars 80 The Providence Rhode Island US String Quartet has started the Storefront Strings program offering impromptu concerts and lessons out of a storefront in one of Providence s poorer neighborhoods 81 What really makes this for me said Rajan Krishnaswami cellist and founder of Simple Measures is the audience reaction you really get that audience feedback 82 Performance editChamber music performance is a specialized field and requires a number of skills not normally required for the performance of symphonic or solo music Many performers and authors have written about the specialized techniques required for a successful chamber musician Chamber music playing writes M D Herter Norton requires that individuals make a unified whole yet remain individuals The soloist is a whole unto himself and in the orchestra individuality is lost in numbers 83 Music of friends edit nbsp Chamber musicians going at each other from The Short tempered Clavichord by illustrator Robert BonottoMany performers contend that the intimate nature of chamber music playing requires certain personality traits David Waterman cellist of the Endellion Quartet writes that the chamber musician needs to balance assertiveness and flexibility 84 Good rapport is essential Arnold Steinhardt first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet notes that many professional quartets suffer from frequent turnover of players Many musicians cannot take the strain of going mano a mano with the same three people year after year 85 Mary Norton a violinist who studied quartet playing with the Kneisel Quartet at the beginning of the last century goes so far that players of different parts in a quartet have different personality traits By tradition the first violin is the leader but this does not mean a relentless predominance The second violinist is a little everybody s servant The artistic contribution of each member will be measured by his skill in asserting or subduing that individuality which he must possess to be at all interesting 86 Interpretation edit For an individual the problems of interpretation are challenging enough writes Waterman but for a quartet grappling with some of the most profound intimate and heartfelt compositions in the music literature the communal nature of decision making is often more testing than the decisions themselves 87 nbsp Quartet lesson on YouTube Daniel Epstein teaching the Schumann piano quartet at Manhattan School of Music Picture The Music Lesson by Jan Vermeer The problem of finding agreement on musical issues is complicated by the fact that each player is playing a different part that may appear to demand dynamics or gestures contrary to those of other parts in the same passage Sometimes these differences are even specified in the score for example where cross dynamics are indicated with one instrument crescendoing while another is getting softer One of the issues that must be settled in rehearsal is who leads the ensemble at each point of the piece Normally the first violin leads the ensemble By leading this means that the violinist indicates the start of each movement and their tempos by a gesture with her head or bowing hand However there are passages that require other instruments to lead For example John Dalley second violinist of the Guarneri Quartet says We ll often ask the cellist to lead in pizzicato passages A cellist s preparatory motion for pizzicato is larger and slower than that of a violinist 88 Players discuss issues of interpretation in rehearsal but often in mid performance players do things spontaneously requiring the other players to respond in real time After twenty years in the Guarneri Quartet I m happily surprised on occasion to find myself totally wrong about what I think a player will do or how he ll react in a particular passage says violist Michael Tree 89 Ensemble blend and balance edit nbsp A graphic interpretation of the Burletta movement of Bartok s String Quartet No 6 by artist Joel EpsteinPlaying together constitutes a major challenge to chamber music players Many compositions pose difficulties in coordination with figures such as hemiolas syncopation fast unison passages and simultaneously sounded notes that form chords that are challenging to play in tune But beyond the challenge of merely playing together from a rhythmic or intonation perspective is the greater challenge of sounding good together To create a unified chamber music sound to blend the players must coordinate the details of their technique They must decide when to use vibrato and how much They often need to coordinate their bowing and breathing between phrases to ensure a unified sound They need to agree on special techniques such as spiccato sul tasto sul ponticello and so on 90 Balance refers to the relative volume of each of the instruments Because chamber music is a conversation sometimes one instrument must stand out sometimes another It is not always a simple matter for members of an ensemble to determine the proper balance while playing frequently they require an outside listener or a recording of their rehearsal to tell them that the relations between the instruments are correct Intonation edit Chamber music playing presents special problems of intonation The piano is tuned using equal temperament that is the 12 notes of the scale are spaced exactly equally This method makes it possible for the piano to play in any key however all the intervals except the octave sound very slightly out of tune String players can play with just intonation that is they can play specific intervals such as fifths exactly in tune Moreover string and wind players can use expressive intonation changing the pitch of a note to create a musical or dramatic effect String intonation is more expressive and sensitive than equal tempered piano intonation 91 However using true and expressive intonation requires careful coordination with the other players especially when a piece is going through harmonic modulations The difficulty in string quartet intonation is to determine the degree of freedom you have at any given moment says Steinhardt 92 The chamber music experience editPlayers of chamber music both amateur and professional attest to a unique enchantment with playing in ensemble It is not an exaggeration to say that there opened out before me an enchanted world writes Walter Willson Cobbett instigator of the Cobbett Competition Cobbett Medal and editor of Cobbett s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music 93 Ensembles develop a close intimacy of shared musical experience It is on the concert stage where the moments of true intimacy occur writes Steinhardt When a performance is in progress all four of us together enter a zone of magic somewhere between our music stands and become a conduit messenger and missionary It is an experience too personal to talk about and yet it colors every aspect of our relationship every good natured musical confrontation all the professional gossip the latest viola joke 94 The playing of chamber music has been the inspiration for numerous books both fiction and nonfiction An Equal Music by Vikram Seth explores the life and love of the second violinist of a fictional quartet the Maggiore Central to the story is the tensions and the intimacy developed between the four members of the quartet A strange composite being we are in performance not ourselves any more but the Maggiore composed of so many disjunct parts chairs stands music bows instruments musicians 95 The Rosendorf Quartet by Nathan Shaham 96 describes the trials of a string quartet in Palestine before the establishment of the state of Israel For the Love of It by Wayne Booth 97 is a nonfictional account of the author s romance with cello playing and chamber music Chamber music societies editNumerous societies are dedicated to the encouragement and performance of chamber music Some of these are the Associated Chamber Music Players or ACMP The Chamber Music Network an international organization that encourages amateur and professional chamber music playing ACMP has a fund to support chamber music projects and publishes a directory of chamber musicians worldwide Chamber Music America supports professional chamber music groups through grants for residencies and commissions through award programs and through professional development programs the Cobbett Association for Chamber Music Research is an organization dedicated to the rediscovery of works of forgotten chamber music Music for the Love of It Archived 2017 11 14 at the Wayback Machine publishes a newsletter on amateur chamber music activities worldwide as well as a guide to music workshops for amateurs the Ottawa Chamber Music Society a non profit organization that encourages public involvement and appreciation of chamber music The OCMS has organized Ottawa Chamber Music Festival the largest chamber music festival in the world since 1994 98 Musica Viva Australia a large non profit chamber music promoter working across Australia that tours local and international chamber music artists as well as managing chamber music festivals and young artist development programs In addition to these national and international organizations there are also numerous regional and local organizations that support chamber music Some of the most prominent professional American chamber music ensembles and organizations are Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center based in New York City Southwest Chamber Music based in Los Angeles Chicago Chamber Music based in Chicago Canadian Brass based in New York and Toronto Juilliard String Quartet in New York Kronos String Quartet in San Francisco Emerson String Quartet in New YorkFestivals editMain article List of chamber music festivalsEnsembles editThis is a partial list of the types of ensembles found in chamber music The standard repertoire for chamber ensembles is rich and the totality of chamber music in print in sheet music form is nearly boundless See the articles on each instrument combination for examples of repertoire Number of musicians Name Common ensembles Instrumentation instr 1 Comments2 Duo Piano duo 2 pianosInstrumental duo any instrument and piano Found especially as instrumental sonatas i e violin cello viola horn oboe bassoon clarinet flute sonatas any instrument and basso continuo Common in baroque music predating the piano The basso continuo part is always present to provide rhythm and accompaniment and is often played by a harpsichord but other instruments can also be used Contemporaneously however such a work was not called a duo but a solo Duet Piano duet 1 piano 4 hands Mozart Beethoven Schubert Brahms original pieces and many transcriptions of his own works a favorite domestic musical form with many transcriptions of other genres operas symphonies concertos and so on Vocal duet voice piano Commonly used in the art song or Lied Instrumental duet 2 of any instrument either equal or not Mozart s Duets KV 423 and 424 for vn and va and Sonata KV 292 for bsn and vc Beethoven s Duet for va and vc Bartok s Duets for 2 vn 3 Trio String trio vln vla vc Mozart s Divertimento K 563 is an important example Beethoven composed 5 trios near the beginning of his career 2 Vln and vla trios have been written by Dvorak Bridge and Kodaly Piano trio vln vc pno Haydn Mozart Beethoven Schubert Chopin Mendelssohn Schumann Brahms Tchaikovsky Dvorak and many others Voice viola and piano Voice vla pno William Bolcom s trio Let Evening Come for Soprano Viola and Piano and Brahms Zwei Gesange Op 91 for Contralto Viola and PianoClarinet viola piano trio cl vla pno Mozart s trio K 498 other works by Schumann and BruchClarinet cello piano trio cl vc pno Beethoven s Trio Op 11 as well as his own transcription Op 38 of the Septet Op 20 trios by Louise Farrenc and Ferdinand Ries Brahms s trio Op 114 Alexander von Zemlinsky s Op 3 Robert Muczynski s Fantasy TrioVoice clarinet and piano voice cl pno Schubert s The Shepherd on the Rock D965 Spohr s LiederFlute viola and harp fl vla hrp Famous works by Debussy and Bax A 20th century invention now with a surprisingly large repertoire A variant is Flute Cello and Harp Flute oboe English horn fl ob E hrn Nicholas Laucella s Divertimento for flute oboe and English hornClarinet violin piano cl vln pno Famous compositions by Bartok Ives Berg Donald Martino Milhaud and Khachaturian all 20th century Horn trio hrn vln pno Two masterpieces by Brahms and LigetiVoice horn and piano voice hrn pno Schubert s Auf Dem Strom Reed trio ob cl bsn 20th century composers such as Villa Lobos have established this typical combination also well suited to transcriptions of Mozart s Basset horn trios if not to Beethoven s 2 ob English horn trio 4 Quartet String quartet 2 vln vla vc Very popular form Numerous major examples by Haydn its creator Mozart Beethoven Schubert and many other leading composers see article Piano quartet vln vla vc pno Mozart s KV 478 and 493 Beethoven youth compositions Schumann Brahms FaureViolin clarinet cello piano vln cl vc pno Rare famous example Messiaen s Quatuor pour la fin du temps less famous Hindemith 1938 Walter Rabl Op 1 1896 Clarinet quartet 3 B Clarinets and Bass Clarinet Twentieth century composersSaxophone quartet s sax a sax t sax b sax or a sax a sax t sax b sax Examples Eugene Bozza Paul Creston Alfred Desenclos Pierre Max Dubois Philip Glass Alexander Glazunov David Maslanka Florent Schmitt Jean Baptiste Singelee Iannis XenakisFlute quartet 4 fls or fl vln vla and vlc Examples include those by Friedrich Kuhlau Anton Reicha Eugene Bozza Florent Schmitt and Joseph Jongen 20th Century Shigeru Kan noPercussion quartet 4 Percussion Twentieth century Composers include John Cage David Lang and Paul Lansky See So PercussionWind instrument and String trio vn va vc and fl ob cl bsn Mozart s four Flute Quartets and one Oboe Quartet Krommer s Flute Quartets e g Op 75 Clarinet Quartets and Bassoon Quartets e g his Op 46 set Devienne s Bassoon Quartet Jorg Duda s Finnish QuartetsAccordion and wind trio acc fl cl bsn Robert Davine s Divertimento for flute clarinet bassoon and accordionPiano and wind trio pno cl hrn bsn Franz Berwald s Op 1 1819 Voice and piano trio voice pno vn vc Used by Beethoven and Joseph Haydn for settings of Lieder based on folk melodies5 Quintet Piano quintet 2 vln vla vc pno Schumann s Op 44 Brahms Bartok Dvorak Shostakovich and othersvln vla vc cb pno An uncommon instrumentation used by Franz Schubert in his Trout Quintet as well as by Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Louise Farrenc Wind quintet fl cl ob bsn hrn 19th century Reicha Danzi and others and 20th century composers Carl Nielsen s Op 43 String quintet 2 vln vla vc with additional vla vc or cb with 2nd vla Michael Haydn Mozart Beethoven Brahms Bruckner with 2nd vc Boccherini Schubert with cb Vagn Holmboe Dvorak Wind amp strings quintet ob cl vln vla cb Prokofiev Quintet in G minor Op 39 In six movements 1925 Brass quintet 2 tr 1 hrn 1 trm 1 tuba Mostly after 1950 Clarinet quintet cl 2 vn 1 va 1 vc Mozart s KV 581 Brahms s Op 115 Weber s Op 34 Samuel Coleridge Taylor s Op 10 Hindemith s Quintet in which the clarinet player must alternate between a B and an E instrument Milton Babbitt s Clarinet Quintet and many others cl pno left hand vn va vc Schmidt s chamber pieces dedicated to the pianist Paul Wittgenstein who played with the left hand only although they are almost always performed nowadays in a two hands version arranged by Friedrich Wuhrer Piano and wind quartet pno ob cl bsn hrn Mozart s KV 452 Beethoven s Op 16 and many others including two by Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov and Anton Rubinstein The four wind instruments may vary Pierrot ensemble fl cl vln vc pno Named after Arnold Schoenberg s Pierrot Lunaire which was the first piece to demand this instrumentation Other works include Joan Tower s Petroushkates Sebastian Currier s Static and Elliott Carter s Triple Duo Some works such as Pierrot Lunaire itself augment the ensemble with voice or percussion Reed quintet ob cl a sax bs cl bsn 20th and 21st centuries Wind instrument and string quartet wind instrument 2 vn va vc Mozart s Quintet for Clarinet and Strings Brahms Quintet for Clarinet and Strings Franz Krommer s Quintet for Flute and Strings Op 66 Bax s Quintet for Oboe and Strings6 Sextet String sextet 2 vln 2 vla 2 vc Important among these are Brahms s Op 18 and Op 36 Sextets and Schoenberg s Verklarte Nacht Op 4 original version Wind sextet 2 ob 2 bsn 2 hrn or 2 cl 2 hrn 2 bsn By Mozart there are the two types Beethoven used the one with clPiano and wind quintet fl ob cl bsn hrn pno Such as the Poulenc Sextet and another by Ludwig Thuille Piano sextet vln 2 vla vc cb pno e g Mendelssohn s Op 110 also one by Leslie Bassett 2 cl 2 vln vla vc pno Prokofiev s Overture on Hebrew Themes Op 34 Copland s Sextet 7 Septet Wind and string septet cl hrn bsn vln vla vc cb Popularized by Beethoven s Septet Op 20 Berwald s and many others 8 Octet Wind and string octet cl hrn bsn 2 vln vla vc cb or cl 2 hrn vln 2 vla vc cb Schubert s Octet D 803 inspired by Beethoven s Septet and Spohr s Octet Op 32 String octet 4 vln 2 vla 2 vc less commonly 4 vln 2 vla vc cb Popularized by Mendelssohn s String Octet Op 20 Others among them works by Bruch Woldemar Bargiel George Enescu s String Octet Op 7 and a pair of pieces by Shostakovich have followed Double quartet 4 vln 2 vla 2 vc Two string quartets arranged antiphonically A genre preferred by Spohr Milhaud s Op 291 Octet is rather a couple of String Quartets his 14th and 15th performed simultaneouslyWind octet 2 ob 2 cl 2 hrn 2 bsn Mozart s KV 375 and 388 Beethoven s Op 103 Franz Lachner s Op 156 Reinecke s Op 216 many written by Franz Krommer Including one written by Stravinsky and the delightful Petite Symphonie by Gounod Vocal octet 2 sop 2 alto 2 ten 2 bass Robert Lucas de Pearsall s Lay a garland and Purcell s Hear My Prayer 9 Nonet Wind and string nonet fl ob cl hrn bsn vln vla vc cb Grand Nonetto 1813 by Spohr Nonet 1849 by Louise Farrenc Nonet 1875 by Franz Lachner Petite Symphonie 1885 by Charles Gounod Stanford s Serenade 1905 Parry s Wind Nonet 1877 Nonet 1923 by Heitor Villa Lobos Planos 1934 by Silvestre Revueltas three by Bohuslav Martinu four by Alois Haba 10 Decet Double wind quintet 2 ob 2 English hrn 2 cl 2 hrn 2 bsn Mozart s set or 2 fl ob Eng hrn 2 cl 2 hrn and 2 bsn Enescu s set There are few double wind quintets written in the 18th century notable exceptions being partitas by Josef Reicha and Antonio Rosetti but in the 19th and 20th centuries they are plentiful The most common instrumentation is 2 flutes piccolo 2 oboes or English horn two clarinets two horns and two bassoons Some of the best 19th century compositions are the Emile Bernard Divertissement Arthur Bird s Suite and the Salomon Jadassohn Serenade to name a few In the 20th century the Decet dixtuor in D Op 14 by Enescu written in 1906 is a well known example Frequently an additional bass instrument is added to the standard double wind quintet Over 500 works have been written for these instruments and related ones 99 Key vln violin vla viola vc cello cb double bass pno piano fl flute ob oboe Eng hrn English horn cl clarinet s sax soprano saxophone a sax alto saxophone t sax tenor saxophone b sax baritone saxophone bsn bassoon hrn horn tr trumpet trm tromboneNotes edit Christina Bashford The String Quartet and Society in Stowell 2003 p 4 The expression music of friends was first used by Richard Walthew in a lecture published in South Place Institute London in 1909 Walthew Richard H 1909 The Development of Chamber Music London Boosey p 42 Estelle Ruth Jorgensen The Art of Teaching Music Bloomington Indiana University Press 2008 153 54 ISBN 978 0 253 35078 7 cloth ISBN 978 0 253 21963 3 pbk Christina Bashford The String Quartet and Society in Stowell 2003 p 4 The quote was from a letter to C F Zelter November 9 1829 For a detailed discussion of the origins of chamber music see Ulrich 1966 Boyden 1965 p 12 Ulrich 1966 p 18 Donington 1982 p 153 Solos for a German Flute a Hoboy or a Violin published by John Walsh c 1730 Ulrich 1966 p 131 Trio sonata from The Musical Offering BWV 1079 by J S Bach is from a performance in June 2001 by flutist Taka Konishi and Ensemble Brillante at Faith Presbyterian Church in Detroit Gjerdingen 2007 p 6 Ulrich 1966 pp 20 21 See Donald Tovey Haydn in Cobbett 1929 or Geiringer 1982 Parker Mara 2017 The String Quartet Taylor amp Francis ISBN 9781351540278 J A Fuller Maitland Pianoforte and Strings in Cobbett 1929 p 220 v II Geiringer 1982 p 80 for a discussion of the effects of social change on music of the 18th and 19th centuries see Raynor 1978 David Boyden The Violin pp 31 35 in Sadie 1989 incomplete short citation Cecil Glutton The Pianoforte in Baines 1969 Maynard Solomon Beethoven Beyond Classicism p 59 in Winter amp Martin 1994 Stephen Hefling The Austro Germanic quartet tradition in the nineteenth century in Stowell 2003 p 244 Solomon 1980 p 117 The quote is from Ferdinand Ries s recollections of conversations with Beethoven Miller 2006 p 57 Joseph Kerman Beethoven Quartet Audiences Actual Potential Ideal p 21 in Winter amp Martin 1994 Miller 2006 p 28 Kerman in Winter amp Martin 1994 p 27 For a complete analysis of the late quartets see Kerman 1979 Ulrich 1966 p 270 Recording is by Caeli Smith and Ryan Shannon violins Nora Murphy viola and Nick Thompson and Rachel Grandstrand celli For an analysis of these works as well as the quintet see Willi Kahl Schubert in Cobbett 1929 pp 352 364 Piano quintet Op 44 by Robert Schumann last movement is played by Steans Artists of Musicians from Ravinia in concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Traffic libsyn com Fannie Davies Schumann in Cobbett 1929 pp 368 394 Stephen Hefling The Austro Germanic quartet tradition of the nineteenth century in Stowell 2003 p 239 Hefling in Stowell 2003 p 233 Ross April Marie August 2015 A Guide to Arranging Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Harmoniemusik in an Historical Style Archived from the original on 2021 05 01 Bashford in Stowell 2003 p 10 For a detailed discussion of quartet societies in France see Fauquet 1986 incomplete short citation Lott Marie S 2008 Audience and style in nineteenth century chamber music c 1830 to 1880 University of Rochester Eastman School of Music ProQuest Dissertations Publishing a b Radice Mark A 2012 Chamber music An essential history The University of Michigan The University of Michigan Press p 115 ISBN 978 0 472 02811 5 Bashford Christina 2010 Historiography and Invisible Musics Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth Century Britain Journal of the American Musicological Society 63 2 291 360 doi 10 1525 jams 2010 63 2 291 ISSN 0003 0139 Bashford Christina Summer 2010 Historiography and Invisible Musics Domestic Chamber Music in Nineteenth Century Britain Journal of the American Musicological Society 63 2 291 360 doi 10 1525 jams 2010 63 2 291 JSTOR 10 1525 jams 2010 63 2 291 Bashford in Stowell 2003 p 5 Bashford in Stowell 2003 p 6 For a discussion of the impact of the piano on string quartet composition see Griffiths 1985 Tully Potter From chamber to concert hall in Stowell 2003 p 50 Robert Schumann Neue Bahnen in the journal Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik October 1853 W3 rz berlin mpg de accessed 2007 10 30 Swafford 1997 p 52 Swafford 1997 pp 290 292 Swafford 1997 p 95 Schoenberg 1984 cited in Swafford 1997 p 632 Schoenberg 1984 cited in Swafford 1997 p 633 a b Miller 2006 p 104 Debussy himself denied that he was an impressionist See Thomson 1940 p 161 Miller 2006 p 218 Einstein 1947 p 332 Butterworth 1980 p 91 Butterworth 1980 p 107 Eosze 1962 pp 20 40 Griffiths 1978 p 7 Griffiths 1978 p 104 Baron 1998 p 385 Baron 1998 p 382 a b Baron 1998 p 383 Baron 1998 p 396 Baron 1998 p 403 Steve Reich Composer s Notes at 1 Karlheinz Stockhausen Awake no 16 July 7 1970 from Aus den sieben Tagen Fur kommende Zeiten For Times to Come Pour les temps a venir 17 Texte fur Intuitive Musik Werk Nr 33 Kurten Stockhausen Verlag 1976 66 K Robert Schwarz A New Look at a Major Minimalist in The New York Times May 6 1990 Section H p 24 Retrieved 20 April 2010 McCalla 2003 p 88 Crumb 1971 Robert Davine Interview with Bruce Duffie www kcstudio com Irvine Arditti Flight of Fantasy The Strad March 2008 52 53 55 Baron 1998 p 435 Baron 1998 p 424 Booth 1999 p 15 Theresa Schiavone Amateurs Help Keep Chamber Music Alive All Things Considered August 27 2005 NPR Antoine Hennion Music industry and music lovers beyond Benjamin The return of the amateur in Soundscapes volume 2 July 1999 available online at Soundscapes info Music For The Love of It musicfortheloveofit com Archived from the original on 2017 11 14 Retrieved 2017 12 12 ACMP The Chamber Music Network acmp net Retrieved 2017 12 12 Baron 1998 p 425 Simple Measures Simple Measures Archived from the original on 2006 05 13 Retrieved 2012 05 12 Storefront Strings How the Providence Quartet built an Inner City Residency PDF Archived from the original PDF on 2012 05 07 Retrieved 2012 05 12 Classical Music Sans Stuffiness radio interview with Dave Beck KUOW FM Seattle December 28 2008 Simplepleasures org Norton 1925 p 18 Waterman in Stowell 2003 p 101 Steinhardt 1998 p 6 Norton 1925 pp 25 32 David Waterman Playing quartets the view from inside in Stowell 2003 p 99 Blum 1986 p 11 Blum 1986 p 5 For a detailed discussion of problems of blending in a string quartet see Norton 1925 chapter 7 Waterman in Stowell 2003 p 110 Blum 1986 p 28 Cobbett Chamber Music Life in Cobbett 1929 p 254 Steinhardt 1998 p 10 Seth 1999 p 86 Shaham 1994 Booth 1999 Spotlight on Ottawa Chamberfest Spotlight Your Guide to What s Happening City of Ottawa Retrieved May 30 2011 Earsense Chamberbase Statistics Retrieved 2012 05 12 Bibliography edit Baron John Herschel 1998 Intimate Music A History of the Idea of Chamber Music Pendragon Press ISBN 1 57647 018 0 Blum David 1986 The Art of Quartet Playing The Guarneri Quartet in conversation with David Blum New York Alfred A Knopf ISBN 0 8014 9456 7 Booth Wayne 1999 For the Love of It Chicago University of Chicago Press ISBN 0 226 06585 5 Boyden David 1965 The History of Violin Playing Oxford and New York Oxford University Press Butterworth Neil 1980 Dvorak His Life and Times Midas Books ISBN 0 85936 142 X Cobbett Walter Willson ed 1929 Cobbett s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music London Oxford University Press ISBN 9781906857820 and ISBN 978 1906857844 Crumb George 1971 Black Angels Edition Peters Donington Robert 1982 Baroque Music Style and Performance New York W W Norton ISBN 0 393 30052 8 Einstein Alfred 1947 Music in the Romantic Era New York W W Norton ISBN 9780393097337 Eosze Laszlo 1962 Zoltan Kodaly his life and work Istvans Farkas and Gyula Gulyas translators Collet s Geiringer Karl 1982 Haydn a Creative Life in Music University of California Press ISBN 0 520 04317 0 Gjerdingen Robert 2007 Music in the Galant Style Oxford and New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 531371 0 Griffiths Paul 1978 A Concise History of Modern Music Thames and Hudson ISBN 0 500 20164 1 Griffiths Paul 1985 The String Quartet a History Thames and Hudson ISBN 0 500 27383 9 Kerman Joseph 1979 The Beethoven Quartets New York W W Norton ISBN 0 393 00909 2 McCalla James 2003 Twentieth Century Chamber Music Routledge ISBN 0 4159 6695 7 Miller Lucy 2006 Adams to Zemlinsky Concert Artists Guild ISBN 1 892862 09 3 Norton M D Herter 1925 The Art of String Quartet Playing New York Simon and Schuster 1962 Raynor Henry 1978 Social History of Music Boston Taplinger Publishing ISBN 9780800872380 Schoenberg Arnold 1984 Leonard Stein ed Style and Ideal Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press Seth Vikram 1999 An Equal Music Vintage ISBN 0 375 70924 X Shaham Natan 1994 The Rosendorf Quartet Grove Press ISBN 0 8021 3316 9 Solomon Maynard 1980 Beethoven Granada Publishing Limited ISBN 0 586 05189 9 Steinhardt Arnold 1998 Indivisible by Four Farrar Straus and Giroux ISBN 0 374 52700 8 Stowell Robert ed 2003 The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet Cambridge Companions to Music Cambridge and New York Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 80194 X Swafford Jan 1997 Johannes Brahms Vintage Books ISBN 0 679 74582 3 Ulrich Homer 1966 Chamber Music Columbia University Press ISBN 0 231 08617 2 Winter Robert Martin Robert eds 1994 The Beethoven Quartet Companion Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press ISBN 0 520 20420 4 Further reading editSadie Stanley ed 1984 The New Grove Violin Family New York W W Norton ISBN 0 393 02556 X The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ed Stanley Sadie 1980 Sicca Luigi Maria 2000 Chamber music and organization theory some typical organizational phenomena seen under the microscope Studies in Cultures Organizations and Societies 6 2 Taylor amp Francis 145 168 doi 10 1080 10245280008523545 ISSN 1024 5286 S2CID 145538145 Sumner Lott Marie 2015 The Social Worlds of Nineteenth Century Chamber Music Composers Consumers Communities University of Illinois Press ISBN 978 0 252 03922 5 Retrieved 12 February 2017 Thompson Oscar 1940 Debussy Man and Artist Tudor Publishing External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chamber music Library resources about Chamber music Resources in your library Resources in other libraries Chamber Music America earsense chamberbase an online database of over 50 000 chamber works Fischoff National Chamber Music Association sponsor of the chamber music competitions and a supporter of chamber music education Associated Chamber Music Players ACMP New York City Annotated bibliography of double wind quintet musicPortal nbsp Classical music Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Chamber music amp oldid 1196965520 Ensembles, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
