[MUSIC] Listening “in chambers”

Chamber music…What is it? Would I like it? Where can I hear some in Charleston?

Word on some streets is that this music has a bad reputation: stuffy, too serious and old, played and listened to by people in powdered wigs. All the things that people get in their head about classical music, but even more so.

I’ve been hearing it might have an even worse image problem: most people aren’t really sure what it is at all. Do you know? Would you like to know?

Let’s have the Grove Dictionary of Music help us with the textbook definition stuff:

In current usage the term ‘chamber music’ generally denotes music written for small instrumental ensemble, with one player to a part, and intended for performance either in private, in a domestic environment with or without listeners, or in public in a small concert hall before an audience of limited size.

In essence, the term implies intimate, carefully constructed music, written and played for its own sake; and one of the most important elements in chamber music is the social and musical pleasure for musicians of playing together.

So, it’s music for small groups, rather than large choruses, bands, or orchestras. A lot of rock bands could be called chamber groups—just a few people, making music together.

Having played and listened to a lot of it, I don’t think it’s old…or stuffy…any of that. Here are some things that chamber music can be:

Chamber music is experimental music.

Say you’re Beethoven or Mozart or someone, and you want to write a new piece and actually get to hear what it sounds

Montclaire String Quartet

like. You can’t get a computer to play it back, and you’re not going to pay 50 or 100 people to run through something you’re too sure of, but you still want to hear more than just your own piano playing. So, you write something for just a few people. You work new ideas out in your string quartets and piano trios, before you go write them into that grand symphony.

Composers today still do this—they write music for the performers they know they can find and they take risks and try out ideas they might not with larger groups.

Chamber music is intimate

When you see a small group of musicians in concert, you observe each player individually. Each player has a different character, and there are few enough of them that you can get to know each one over the course of the performance. A small group also doesn’t project the way that a large orchestra does, so you sit closer and get a bit cozier with the musicians. Most of the chamber music concerts in Charleston don’t have the performers up on a stage—the shows are in churches, with the audience on level with the performers.

Moscow String Quartet

Chamber music is social

Playing chamber music is a fun way for musicians to spend an evening together…like gathering around a table for a game of cards. Charles Ives (an innovative American composer) described one of his string quartets as a group of four people having an argument! If you watch a chamber music concert, observe how the musicians communicate: breathing and moving together, glancing at each other, directing a musical phrase towards one another, sometimes working together and other times challenging the others.

Chamber music is varied

Sure, string quartets (two violins, viola, and a cello) might be the most common, but then you have all sorts of configurations involving various wind, string, brass, and percussion instruments (and the piano is a percussion instrument—it’s full of strings, but the keys control hammers that strike the strings. But I digress…). There’s wind quintets and brass quintets, or duets of any two instruments you can throw together (one of my favorites was a duet of a tuba and a piccolo!), and that’s just a few of the ensembles out there.

Vienna Piano Trio

Then there’s the Quartet for the End of Time. It’s for clarinet, cello, violin, and piano—the only instruments/players that French composer Olivier Messiaen had on hand when he wrote this piece to perform with fellow prisoners in a concentration camp. It’s being performed this month in Charleston. The Charleston Chamber Music Society has brought string quartets, solo classical guitar players, brass quintets, piano trios, and others to town.

These are just some of the reasons I love chamber music (besides the fact that there’s just a lot of good sounding chamber music out there!) Tell me what you think over in the comments.
And if any of this sounds interesting to you—you can dive into the world of chamber music with two concerts this month in Charleston:

Saturday, March 21st at 8pm
Montclaire String Quartet (and friends) at Kanawha United Presbyterian Church
$10/adults, $5/students and children

Sunday, March 29th at 2pm
Moscow String Quartet at Christ Church United Methodist
Charleston Chamber Music Society
$17/adults, free for WV State Students

Bonus track: if you want a fun intro to chamber music that you can share with kids, check out the online audio program Boombox Classroom’s show “What is Chamber Music?”

Mona Seghatoleslami is an Announcer/Producer at West Virginia Public Radio and can found writing about classical music in WV and beyond over at Classically Speaking.