Chamber Music
Simply put, chamber music is classical music for a small ensemble, typically, 3 to 6 players without a conductor. Intimate, intense, beautiful, adventurous and profound, chamber music has compelled the world's finest composers, players and listeners for nearly 500 years and is still so vital today.
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Popular Favorites
A great place to discover chamber music or to expand your love and knowledge of the genre is the our list Popular Favorites. Here you will find a few hundred of the greatest, time-honored classics highlighting the most important composers, ensembles, styles and eras.
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Women Composers
Focus on women chamber music composers using the rich search capabilities on earsense for additional filtering by nationality, date, instrumentation, etc. We currently list over 7,000 works by over 700 women composers. Here's a random example: String quartets by French women.
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21st Century Chamber Music
Chamber music is an art form that is arguably 500 years old and it continues to flourish today. Small-ensemble instrumental art music is astonishingly renewable. Here are more than 1,000 21st Century Chamber Music works you can hear right now. explore
Black Music Matters
In the spirit of "Black Lives Matter" to raise awareness, celebrate Black achievement and highlight more great music, here as a list of more than 100 Black composers featuring at least 1,000 chamber music works dating from 1773 to the present day. explore
50 for the Future
The Kronos Quartet presents a free library of fifty new string quartets designed to guide players in developing and honing the skills required for the performance of 21st-century repertoire. The project has gathered a stunning diversity of composers and musicians to create new music "of our time" now added to earsense as well. exploreLists
Lists are useful collections (e.g. playlists) of chamber music works: featured in book, presented by a festival, recommended by experts, offered by a publisher, etc. Also, derived lists: the most popular, outliers, focused on a specific ensemble, especially chosen for your listening pleasure. Useful for exploration, study, programming or simply curiosity, all about getting to know chamber music.
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Search
Given a vast database of chamber music composers and works (along with dates, times, tags, scores, videos and other relationships, etc.), one of the best things about earsense is a very powerful search engine. You can make simple but potentially rich keyword searches using the field at the top of every page or use the advanced search form for highly structured and precise queries.
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Durations & Timing
Useful for presenters, performers, planning, study and comparision, earsense provides timings: the average duration of chamber music works and the movements they comprise. In most cases, the values are derived from a sampling of commercial recordings for the greatest validity.
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Settings
You can customize how earsense looks and behaves in a variety of ways to suit your personal preferences. Your settings are saved in a cookie and remain in effect for that browser/device combination until you change them again. explore>
Program Notes
earsense features articles and program notes from a variety of sources providing a verbal dimension for exploring music through history, aesthetics, analysis, philosophy, biography, etc.. If you wish to reprint anything PLEASE obtain permission from earsense. Otherwise, all rights are reserved and reproduction is strictly prohibited.
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Dashboard
The dashboard is a "busy box" of what's happening today, what's the latest and greatest at earsense featuring: anniversaries, latest videos, composers and works, a random quote, and running totals of items in the earsense database. It is intended as a quick overview as well as as a map for exploration with numerous opportunities to jump off or dive in.
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Scores
Work pages provide links to public domain scores from the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) when available. The IMSLP pages provide all kinds of detailed information in addition to the score itself. We also proudly feature links to Edition Silvertrust scores from a fine publisher of lesser known chamber music works worthy of investigation.
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Anniversaries
The earsense dashboard features composer anniversaries: those who were born or died today. Coming soon, earsense will provide a service to determine important anniversaries of composers and works for a given date, ideal for thematic programming and planning repertoire.
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Latest Videos
earsense features thousands of embedded YouTube chamber music videos with new ones added all the time. You can find a list featuring the most recently added videos on the earsense dashboard, essentially showing "what's new" at earsense.
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Instruments & Ensembles
You can use instrument and ensemble names in the keyword search, and you can use the advanced search to more precisely specify one or more instruments, an ensemble or, start with a standard ensemble and customize the instrumentation. You can search for works by instrumentation along with other parameters: dates, composer, nationality, tags etc. The possibilities are endless!
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Composer Dictionary
As a chamber music exploratorium, earsense provides several ways to search, browse and explore. You can browse composers using a "traditional" dictionary interface from A to Z. Each letter is apt to have several pages of composers. For more specific searching, filtering or sorting, use the search engine.
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Tags
Composers, works and movements can be "tagged" to provide additional classifications, for example, "fugue, "Baroque", "theme and variations", "impressionism", "atonal" and much more. You can show/hide tags (settings) and also use them in searches. Like tags on most sites, they are meaningful keywords.
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Contact earsense
We love hearing from you! Contact us about anything: praise, criticism, questions, corrections, creative ideas, poetic ramblings, problems or suggestions. Here at earsense, we're all ears.
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