Chamber Music

The string quartet was the main but not the only genre developed at this time for small forces in relatively intimate circumstances. Chamber music is a term for music designed to be played in a room (a chamber) — in a palace drawing room or in a small hall. Chamber music can be taken as encompassing compositions for from two to nine players. Other types are the piano trio (violin, cello, piano: a favorite of Haydn) and string quintets (string quartet plus another low instrument; Mozart wrote four superb quintets with two violas, and one of Schubert’s great masterpieces is a quintet with two cellos).

Broadly speaking, what has been said above about the intimate character of the quartet applies to all chamber music, though it’s probably clear enough that a string octet, with eight players, must be less subtle and more orchestral than a string trio, with three players.

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String quartets, then (above) and now (below). Nineteenth-century quartets were often led by celebrated violin soloists; shown here is a group led by a virtuosa of the time, Wilma Norman-Néruda (1838–1911). From left to right: two violins, viola (slightly larger), and cello. © Bettmann/CORBIS.
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Established more than forty years ago, the Kronos Quartet has devoted itself to contemporary music, including compositions from far beyond Europe and America. The quartet also plays arrangements from jazz and rock, and one of its signature encores, early in its history, was an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters/Newscom.