What is Chamber Music?

December 5, 2018

Introduction: A Slight Disclaimer

Kai Christiansen I like to call earsense the chamber music exploratorium. So what exactly is chamber music? The definition varies a bit depending on whom you ask, and it has changed over the many long years of its history (one could claim 500 years). As a chamber music devotee and a passionate, as well as professional advocate, I could write a great deal about chamber music and that, in the end, is really the sum total of earsense itself. But for the purposes of defining a domain (pun intended) particularly for the general music lover who is apt to know little to nothing about it, I would like to offer a reasonably succinct but persuasive overview. My goal is not to be so specific as to be restrictive nor in any way to be elitist about what is fundamentally only one of many musical genres. But earsense is, after all, devoted to something it, and I, specifically call chamber music, my own favorite genre of music, and that is what I mean to present here.

I will certainly qualify this as, ultimately, my own subjective definition and I make no claims for accurately representing historical nuance nor perhaps even the latest trends in modern chamber music. It is a practical, working definition from which earsense springs and, I like to think, a serviceable one for capturing what is essential, special and appealing about this extraordinary musical genre. I will take it on faith that, since I feel so passionately devoted to chamber music in particular, readers will be interested to discover why I, in particular, like it so much. And for this, a subjective definition is actually most valuable.

Finally, I will have to say this is a work in progress. Like earsense itself, this article is apt to grow, change, and even split into multiple parts overtime. Fortunately, the web is the ideal communication and publishing medium for this approach. But for the moment, let’s see what I can get down “on paper.”

Getting to the point: What is Chamber Music?

Simply put, chamber music is “classical music” for a small ensemble. Most commonly, that means 3 to 6 players but general usage easily encompasses 2 to 8 players (without necessarily any hard upper limit per se). No conductor. In modern parlance, is it often called “small ensemble music” particularly to avoid some of the negative connotations of the word “classical” and sometimes to encompass more contemporary music styles than the word “classical” typically denotes. But for our purposes here at earsense, the word “classical” is simply the most efficient keyword to connote a general style, history, attitude and practice of chamber music and to distinguish it from many other popular and artful genres of small ensemble music that earsense does not currently include in its purview (e.g. jazz, rock, bluegrass, folk, world musics and the like).

The term small ensemble distinguishes chamber music from music for large ensemble, namely symphonic music for large orchestras requiring a conductor and with more than one musician to a part. Definitions of chamber music often use the term “one to a part” meaning that each player in the ensemble has his or her own unique part without reinforcement by another player. Each part is essential to the whole; nothing is superfluous.

This smallness, or what we like to call its intimacy is what gave rise to the term “chamber” in the first place. In Latin/Italian (Camera), German (Kammer), French (Chambre), and English (Chamber), the word means “small room” as distinct from a theatre or church, hall or auditorium, all of which are intended more for large public spectacle with perhaps a greater purpose, program or agenda. Simply put, again, chamber music is that which can be accommodated within a modest room: a few musicians, perhaps a few listeners, almost more of a private affair. Certain its historical origins point to private, royal chambers and then, more democratically, a domestic living room or a café. This is one of the reasons that chamber music has been called “the music of friends.”

While chamber music may well include the voice and a sung text and there is a astonishing canon of intimate art music in this form, chamber music, for me and the purposes of earsense, is predominantly instrumental: abstract or “absolute” music that is sound without a verbal dimension. This is not to exclude the human voice, arguably the greatest instrument, as a player of intimate chamber music per se, but for me, more to exclude conceptual language in order to concentrate on the phenomenon of the non-verbal meaning of sound alone. It is also a matter of practicality: I exclude most (not all) vocal chamber music simply because earsense would be MUCH bigger and harder to mange. So, for my purposes, I can say that while, chamber music historically includes vocal music (especially looking back to the Renaissance with Italian madrigals or French chansons comprising the true origins of chamber music), here, I define chamber music as “classical music for small instrumental ensemble.”

Finally, chamber music is intended for players and listeners where the music is enjoyed in and of itself as a listening experience without additional multi-dimensional entertainments like lighting, set designs, graphics or videos, costumes, dancing or elaborate programmatic encumbrances, though, these may certainly accompany the experience. Chamber music delights in the artful expression of “pure” sound and the activity of undistracted and concentrated listening. When I am most rapt in the midst of a chamber music “experience”, I tend to close my eyes.

The eminent British musicologist, historian and composer Donald Tovey summaries admirably:

For general purposes, chamber music may be defined as instrumental music written for a group of individual performers, and intended to be heard for its own sake in such rooms as are to be found in private houses. Dance music, and music intended 'to accompany the clatter of dishes at a princely table', exclude themselves from the category of music intended to be heard for its own sake.

—Donald Tovey

The Greatest Composers, Their Greatest Works

Ok. There’s a reasonably terse and serviceable definition (to reiterate): instrumental classical music for small ensemble. Initially, that might suggest that, within the realm of classical music with its grand symphonies, operas, concertos and requiem masses, small ensemble music is, well, small: smaller impact, smaller historical significance, worth only a smaller part of your attention.

Not so! Most of the greatest and most familiar classical composers you might name (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten etc.) have also written chamber music, and, in many cases, it is their best music! There are some primary reasons for this.

Chamber music bears much less of a burden to achieve a public spectacle, to wow, dazzle or entertain in the pedestrian sense of the word (although it certain can do that). Simply from a practical viewpoint, its modest forces don’t carry. More often, it appeals to and is written for connoisseurs and so it sometimes acquires a greater subtlety, complexity or sophistication. It is also generally considered more difficult to create and to perform (not necessarily to hear). Every part is essential, unique and fully exposed. Vulnerable. Naked. There is no padding, reinforcement or redundancy. It offers a supreme creative challenge. But further more, as chamber music is more often free from the demands of success in the public marketplace, it can be more experimental, innovative and challenging.

And it is literally more private. Many of the greatest composers have used chamber music for their inner most expressions of love, despair, transcendent spirituality or simply their most personal, idiosyncratic and far reaching. For many composers, chamber music comprises their most intense, creative and powerful music.

For all these reasons, a composer’s chamber music is the very music you are less apt to know. I often say that most people know of Beethoven’s 5th symphony, but far fewer seem to know of his 15th string quartet. That is truly unfortunate. In my humble opinion, you are missing Beethoven’s best, at least within a very special genre. But, of course, I am biased.

End of Part 1, for now . . .

© Kai Christiansen Used by permission. All rights reserved.

"Chamber music is a bountiful source of pleasure to those who know the field. It is at once one of the most enjoyable and the most dignified of literatures. . . .It has challenged the greatest composers to their best efforts. . . the source for the finest music in western civilization. . . .Chamber music is based upon flawless balance and ensemble, a selfless teamwork, the achievement of which is one of the finest manifestations of the human spirit."

—Homer Ulrich, Chamber Music

"The significance of chamber music is that in dealing with the intimate it can attain the ineffable. Chamber music conceives itself as a world of sound that has external boundaries but no internal ones."

—Hans Werner Henze

Simply put, chamber music is “classical music” for a small ensemble.

—Kai Christiansen

I hate "classical music": not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name.

—Alex Ross

"For general purposes, chamber music may be defined as instrumental music written for a group of individual performers, and intended to be heard for its own sake in such rooms as are to be found in private houses. Dance music, and music intended 'to accompany the clatter of dishes at a princely table', exclude themselves from the category of music intended to be heard for its own sake."

—Donald Tovey

"Any consideration of chamber music must start with its [live] performance and with hearing its unique, intimate sounds."

—John H. Baron

I am not a fan of electronic instruments, by which I mean synthesizers and samplers. It's not that I don't like them—sometimes I do. It's just that when you listen deeply to an acoustic instrument you hear wood, breath, the fibers of cane. When you listen deeply to electronic music, you hear electrons. I like electrons. But I love wood, breath, reeds, skin, and hair.

—W. A. Mathieu

"[About Chamber Music] There is enough volume of tone to fill the ear without overcharging it: there is enough variety of texture to excite interest without distracting attention and to keep it unflagging till the end; no other can delight our senses with such exquisite beauty of sound, or display so clearly to our intelligence the intricacies and adventures of its design. We have but to think of Haydn's Emperor or Schubert's octet, or the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms, or Beethoven's 'harp' quartet, or the cavatina, or the finale of the quartet in A minor; to those of us who have lived with music, these are far more than the memory of pleasant experiences: they are as the faces of friends, they have become an integral part of our lives."

—Sir Henry Hadow, Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music

"The string quartet - chamber music with a symphonic dimension - has never been an easy medium to master. Manipulating the lean, four-part texture of this "little orchestra for the salon" demands great contrapuntal mastery and that every note carry maximum meaning. It can be dangerously revealing: there is no hiding behind splashy sounds, as is possible in piano or orchestral music. Even the greatest composers have had to work hard to strike a balance between the medium's intimacy and its large-scale potential."

—Paul Epstein

"In the two centuries since chamber music began to be distinguished from church music or theater music, the private chamber of the princely entourage has given way to the modern concept of music in a "chamber" to which all may have access . . . The chamber musicians, chamber singers and chamber virtuosos of old were called upon to perform for privileged guests. Our "chamber" today, whether it be an intimate concert hall, a room in someone's home, or a schoolroom, admits people from all walks of life and music of many media."

—Ruth Halle Rowen, Early Chamber Music

"Composers, performers and audiences have regarded chamber music as one of the most "pure" forms of music. By "pure" is meant that the music stands on its own, as a musically logical happening, without the need of other considerations to give it its raison d'être. "

—John H. Baron, Intimate Music