Chamber music
Chamber music is a form of classical music,
written for a small group of instruments
which traditionally could be accommodated
in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it in-
cludes any art music that is performed by a
small number of performers with one per-
former to a part. The word "chamber" signi-
fies that the music can be performed in a
small room, often in a private salon with an
intimate atmosphere. However,
it usually
does not include, by definition, solo instru-
ment performances.
Because of its intimate nature, chamber
music has been described as "the music of
friends."[1] For more than 200 years, cham-
ber music was played primarily by amateur
musicians in their homes, and even today,
when most chamber music performance has
migrated from the home to the concert hall,
there are still many musicians, amateur and
professional, who continue to play chamber
music for their own pleasure. Playing cham-
ber music requires special skills, both music-
al and social, which are different from the
skills required for playing solo or symphonic
works.
Goethe described chamber music (spe-
cifically, string quartet music) as "four ration-
al people conversing."[2] This conversational
paradigm 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 mu-
sic compositions.
History of chamber
music
From its earliest beginnings in the Medieval
period to the present, chamber music has
been a reflection of the changes in the tech-
nology and the society that produced it.
Early beginnings
During the Middle Ages and the early Renais-
sance, instruments were used primarily as
accompaniment for singers[3]. String players
would play along with the melody line sung
Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen play a
quartet on viols in this fanciful woodcut from
1516.
by the singer. There were also purely instru-
mental ensembles, often of stringed precurs-
ors of the violin family, called