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...
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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.