What Is Chamber Music?

Chamber music is one of the most important forms of classical music. The most standard definition of the term chamber music is music composed for a small group of instrumentalists. However, that still leaves some basic questions unanswered. Does it refer to an actual chamber where music is played? What is the difference between chamber music and orchestral music? How far back does chamber music go historically? How has the genre evolved over time? It is true that by the end of the 17th century, the term “chamber music” reflected the practice of performing music in a palace chamber. But chamber music existed long before then.

Chamber music, as its own independent genre, has its roots in the European courts of the 15th century. At that time, there were two types of music-making: loud music (brass, pipes, drums) for ceremonies and festivals; and soft music (harps, strings, flutes, sometimes voices) for smaller social gatherings. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century led to music printing in the 16th century, and as printed sheet music became more widely available, amateur musicians in wealthy households across Europe could purchase music to play in their homes. Small groups of instrumentalists in the 16th and 17th centuries—in both the court and the home—are now often known as consorts. Chamber music largely grew out of the consorts. However, at the time, there was not much distinction between different types of instrumental ensembles.

Baroque Era

(c. 1600–c. 1750)

What really began to set chamber music apart as its own entity was the development of the orchestra in the late 17th century. The main features that differentiated orchestral music from chamber music were typically a large number of string instruments and the court as the primary venue for performance. As in orchestras today, groups of string instruments often played from the same written music, or part. Wind, brass, and percussion instruments were sometimes included in these orchestras and increasingly became more common. Keyboard instruments, such as harpsichords, often appeared in the orchestras of the 17th and early 18th centuries, and usually combined with the cellos and basses to provide the basso continuo—or fundamental harmonic structure—of the composition.

Bach: Trio Sonata in C minor for Flute, Violin, and Continuo, from Musical Offering, BWV 1079

Bach: Trio Sonata in C minor for Flute, Violin, and Continuo, from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079

One of the most popular forms of chamber music during this time was the trio sonata, which consisted of a continuo part (keyboard and a bass instrument in this case) and two melodic instruments. This type of composition usually appeared in one of two forms: sonata da chiesa (church sonata), with four movements in a slow-fast-slow-fast scheme, and sonata da camera (court sonata), which resembled a dance suite with variable movement structure. Although the trio sonatas of the 17th century often featured a continuo part, the presence of continuo gradually began to disappear from chamber music in the 18th century. Since multiple instrumentalists played from the continuo part, its evaporation accounts for the tendency of chamber music to require only one player per part.

Baroque Composers

Classical Era

(c. 1750–c. 1825)

In the second half of the 18th century, the development of two instrumental genres further reinforced the demarcation between chamber music and orchestral music: the string quartet and the symphony. Although Joseph Haydn is often considered the father of both the symphony and the string quartet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven also helped to define and advance these genres. These two types of compositions were not so different from one another in their structure. Many shared a fast-slow-fast-fast four-movement scheme and a first movement based on a common compositional technique of the era called sonata form. However, the establishment of the string quartet and symphonic genres—as well as a common string quartet instrumentation (two violins, viola, cello) and increased standardization of orchestral instrumentation—created two distinct worlds: chamber music and orchestral music. Other types of chamber ensembles, such as the string trio and piano trio, also began to emerge and became more common. This trend towards definition and categorization reflects the concurrent Age of Enlightenment in philosophy and science and contrasts the more variable ensemble instrumentations and compositional forms of the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Beethoven: Quartet in C-sharp minor for Strings, Op. 131

Classical Composers

Romantic Era

(c. 1825–c. 1900)

The 19th century brought many changes to the landscape of chamber music. The decline of the aristocracy moved music from the home to the concert hall. Professional ensembles took the place of amateur ensembles—groups of aristocrats with more limited musical training. Conservatories arose to train a new generation of instrumentalists. Composers began to write more demanding music.

Chamber compositions from this period called for new instrumental combinations and an increasing number of players. The expansion of orchestra sizes required someone to pull together these growing forces: the conductor. Before the 19th century, orchestras were typically conducted by the keyboardist leading the continuo, the violinist concertmaster, or a concerto soloist. The introduction of the conductor provided yet another distinction between the orchestra and the chamber ensemble, which continued to remain an autonomous entity. The absence of a conductor in chamber music necessitated other forms of interpersonal communication to hold the music together, such as leading and cueing—visual signaling between musicians to show important features in the music and ensure that the ensemble is coordinated. These personal interactions, and the relationships they created between players, continue to be a defining characteristic of chamber music.

In the latter half of the 19th century, a new conflict emerged: absolute music (music for the sake of music) vs. programmatic music (music with a narrative). The primary representatives of these factions were Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt, respectively. Because the Liszt camp, or “New Germans,” believed that the forms used by previous generations of composers—such as the symphony and the string quartet—were outdated, new shorter forms—such as nocturnes, rhapsodies, and symphonic poems—appeared. The adoption of these new forms, which were written primarily for solo piano or orchestra, resulted in the decline of chamber repertoire in the musical outputs of Liszt and his fellow New Germans, such as Richard Wagner. Chamber music nevertheless continued to thrive in the works of Brahms and his contemporaries, such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Antonín Dvořák.

Brahms: Sonata No. 1 in E minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 38

The 19th century also challenged the view of Western classical music as an exclusively Western European domain. Nationalist composers, such as Dvořák (Czech), Liszt (Hungarian), Chopin (Polish), Tchaikovsky (Russian), and Grieg (Norwegian), incorporated elements of folk music from their respective cultures into their works. The lack of Western European influence and training was a particular point of pride for members of the Russian group The Mighty Handful (or The Five), which included Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Romantic Composers

Modernist Era

(c. 1900–c. 1945)

The complexity of music increased in terms of harmony and rhythm towards the end of the 19th century. This evolution posed a problem for orchestral music, in which larger numbers of players must coordinate to execute these difficult components of the score. However, for chamber music composition, it presented an opportunity for experimentation. In Europe, the 1910s in particular saw a renaissance of chamber music. Many composers known primarily for their orchestral works—such as Igor Stravinsky and the French Impressionists, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel—turned to the genre because of the limitations imposed on orchestral performances by World War I.

Nationalism remained an ongoing theme in early 20th-century chamber music. Many composers continued to incorporate the traditional music of their cultures into their compositions: notably British folk tunes in the works of Ralph Vaughn Williams and Gustav Holst, Russian in the case of Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev’s earlier works, and Moravian (Czech) in the music of Leoš Janáček and Bohuslav Martinů. The Hungarian composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, who became trailblazers in the field of ethnomusicology—the study of music within its cultural context—were strongly influenced by folk songs they collected in Hungary and surrounding regions. Significant contributions to chamber music also appeared in the US: string quartets with a highly original approach to the genre were written by Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Ives, who also incorporated American folk music, along with hymns, into his compositions.

Janáček: Quartet No. 2 for Strings, “Intimate Letters”

Chamber music in the first half of the 20th century often features complicated rhythms and time signature changes. Composers more frequently call for performers to use different playing or singing techniques. Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 requires the performers to use a technique called Bartók pizzicato, in which a string player pulls a string so hard that it snaps against the fingerboard. In Pierrot lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg, the vocalist employs a style of singing called Sprechstimme, which combines elements of both speaking and singing. This composition also demonstrates the more unusual instrument combinations that appear in early 20th-century chamber music and serves as the namesake for the Pierrot ensemble—piano, flute, clarinet, violin (sometimes doubling viola), and cello.

Although orchestral compositions of this era also incorporate complicated rhythms and different playing techniques, the autonomy and individualistic synergy of chamber music allowed it to blossom into a highly personal form of expression. In Charles Ives’s String Quartet No. 2, each player performs the role of a dramatic character through their musical material. Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite is a programmatic work for string quartet with an unknown narrative and a secret (presumably romantic) dedication. For Dmitri Shostakovich, the string quartet was the platform he turned to after the first denunciation of his work by the Soviet government.

The primary conflict of composition in the first half of the 20th century was between two new schools of composition: serialism and neoclassicism. Serial music was represented most notably by the Second Viennese School—Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern—whose ultimate musical goal was to eradicate the perception of a predominating pitch through a compositional method called twelve-tone technique. Igor Stravinsky (from the 1920s through the ’40s) and Paul Hindemith were the primary proponents of neoclassical music, which took its inspiration from the music of the 19th century and before. Although serialism and neoclassicism introduced a new compositional schism, chamber music repertoire was a significant pillar of both schools and continued to flourish.

Modernist Composers

Contemporary Era

(c. 1945–Present)

After World War II, classical composition went in many different directions, and chamber music rose to a new level of significance. Composers who continued in the vein of the Second Viennese School—and especially Webern—extended the concepts of serialism to rhythm, dynamics, and other musical features to create a technique known as total serialism. The French and German avant-garde pioneered musique concrète—music produced electronically. The confluence of these two strains manifested itself in the works of the Darmstadt School—both an actual summer program in Darmstadt, Germany, and the name of a compositional movement.

Many American composers, during and after the war, followed in the spirit of the neoclassical school to create neoromantic music, which looked back to the 19th century but also often contained elements of American folk and jazz music. The avant-garde in the US—John Cage and his followers—experimented with new forms of graphic notation in scores using shapes and lines instead of notes. These graphic notation practices informed the sonorist music of Poland, which focuses more on sound textures than pitch and rhythm. The practices of both neoromantic composers and the American and European avant-garde influenced the American Generation of ’38, who—although highly individual in their compositional voices—have been grouped together according to their birth year.

Tower: Red Maple for Bassoon, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello

Several composers forged their own paths outside the mold of a broader movement. Between 1950 and 1951, the American composer Elliott Carter composed his String Quartet No. 1, which broke with both his neoclassical roots and the serialist practices of his contemporaries to start a unique stylistic evolution that would continue into the 21st century. In 1968, the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, with his String Quartet No. 2, introduced to the chamber setting a compositional device called micropolyphony, in which layers of pitch or rhythmic patterns create a mass of sound. His penchant for experimentalism transformed the innovations of Bartók and the European avant-garde into his own unique idiom. In 1970, the American composer George Crumb finished Black Angels for amplified string quartet. The score calls for the players to speak, make sounds with their mouths, play with the bow above the fingers on the fingerboard, tap the strings with thimbles, hit cymbals, and play crystal glasses filled with various amounts of water. Crumb’s use of unconventional playing techniques and roles for performers pervaded many of his compositions.

One of the most significant developments in classical music of the late 20th century is known as minimalism. This style of composition, which is frequently marked by repetitive pulses or patterns, appears in the works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. Electronic components, such as recordings, are sometimes incorporated into these works. This movement spawned postminimalism—a moniker which has lasted into the 21st century and been applied to the works of Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Caroline Shaw.

The second half of the 20th century also saw the advent of performance organizations and summer music festivals exclusively dedicated to the furtherance of chamber music. While institutions such as Yellow Barn, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Music@Menlo provide access to chamber music during the summer, chamber music societies such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center offer a platform for chamber music year-round. The combination of an ever-growing chamber music repertoire and an increasing number of performance opportunities for chamber players has made the late 20th century and early 21st century perhaps the most prolific period in the history of chamber music.

Contemporary Composers

Important Composers

Baroque

Arcangelo Corelli, Johann Pachelbel, Henry Purcell, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Sebastian Bach

Contemporary

Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, Leonard Bernstein, John Cage, Witold Lutosławski, György Ligeti, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Górecki, George Crumb, Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, John Harbison, Joan Tower, Charles Wuorinen, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Caroline Shaw

Important Schools:

Total Serialism (Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono)
Darmstadt School (Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio)
Musique concrète (Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis)
Neoromantic Composers (Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein)
Sonorist Composers (Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Górecki)
Generation of ’38 (John Corigliano, Joan Tower, Charles Wuorinen, John Harbison, Ellen Taafe Zwilich)
Minimalist Composers (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams)
Postminimalist Composers (Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Caroline Shaw)

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Article by Jesse Jennings

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Baroque Era

Classical Era

Romantic Era

Modernist Era

Contemporary Era

Important Composers

Baroque

Classical

Romantic

Modernist

Contemporary

Important Schools:

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