The History of Chamber Music

908 Words2 Pages

The History of Chamber Music

What is chamber music?

It is ensemble instrumental music for up to about ten performers with

typically one performer to a part.

Since circa 1450, there has been instrumental music designed for

private playing. These pieces used many instruments and (in Germany)

it was common that the folk songs would contain 2-3 countermelodies to

expand and elaborate the whole, and to arrange the outcome for groups

of instruments. Although the pieces were never written for particular

instruments, we can, through art/paintings, reasonably guess that the

viol was a predominant early chamber music instrument.

A more important source of later chamber music is to be found in the

arrangements of sixteenth-century chansons (songs of French origin

composed usually for four voices on a variety of secular texts), some

for voices and lute, and others for lute alone. A generic convention

of a chanson was that they used to use contrasting metres and also

contrasts in musical texture; the effect of the whole was that of a

short composition in several even shorter sections. That sectional

form retained in the arrangements later became a striking feature.

The Chanson

The chanson travelled to Italy about 1525, became known as canzona,

and was transcribed for organ. The earliest transcriptions differed

from the French arrangements in treating the original chanson with

greater freedom, adding ornaments and flourishes, and sometimes

inserting new material. Soon original canzonas for organ, modelled on

the transcriptions, and for small instrumental ensembles, were

composed. One such type, characterised by elaborate fi...

... middle of paper ...

...ut relatively

smaller roles in the field: the string trio (violin, viola, cello),

string quintet (quartet plus a second viola), and string sextet

(quintet plus a second cello) are chief among them.

Finally, works for individual combinations exist in considerable

number after about the 1780s. Representative compositions of that

non-standard group include the clarinet quintets (string quartet and

clarinet) by Mozart (K. 581) and Brahms (Opus 115); the Septet, Opus

20 (violin, viola, cello, bass, clarinet, bassoon, and horn), by

Beethoven; the Octet, Opus 166 (as in the septet plus a second

violin), the Trout Quintet, Opus 114 (violin, viola, cello, bass, and

piano and the String Quintet in C Major 0 us 163 violins viola and two

cello all by Schubert; and the Horn Trio, Opus 40 (violin, horn, and

piano), by Brahms.

Open Document