Chamber music

In the second half of the 18th century, tastes began to change: many composers preferred a new, lighter Galant style, with "thinner texture, ... and clearly defined melody and bass" to the complexities of counterpoint.

Violinist Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and cellist Johann Baptist Wanhal, who both played pickup quartets with Haydn on second violin and Mozart on viola, were popular chamber music composers of the period.

With the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of new social orders throughout Europe, composers increasingly had to make money by selling their compositions and performing concerts.

At the beginning of the 19th century, luthiers developed new methods of constructing the violin, viola and cello that gave these instruments a richer tone, more volume, and more carrying power.

Even though the pianoforte was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori at the beginning of the 1700s, it did not become widely used until the end of that century, when technical improvements in its construction made it a more effective instrument.

"[25] Among the difficulties are complex syncopations and cross-rhythms; synchronized runs of sixteenth, thirty-second, and sixty-fourth notes; and sudden modulations requiring special attention to intonation.

"The particular kind of inwardness of Beethoven's last style period", writes Joseph Kerman, gives one the feeling that "the music is sounding only for the composer and for one other auditor, an awestruck eavesdropper: you.

On the one hand, he was the darling of Viennese society: he starred in soirées that became known as Schubertiaden, where he played his light, mannered compositions that expressed the gemütlichkeit of Vienna of the 1820s.

Chamber music was the ideal medium to express this conflict, "to reconcile his essentially lyric themes with his feeling for dramatic utterance within a form that provided the possibility of extreme color contrasts.

Composers began to incorporate new elements and techniques into their works to appeal to this open market, since there was an increased consumer desire for chamber music.

César Franck's piano quintet in F minor, composed in 1879, further established the cyclic form first explored by Schumann and Mendelssohn, reusing the same thematic material in each of the three movements.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky uses a typical Russian folk dance in the final movement of his string sextet, Souvenir de Florence, Op.

In Hungary, composers Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók pioneered the science of ethnomusicology by performing one of the first comprehensive studies of folk music.

"Bartók's last two quartets proclaim the sanctity of life, progress and the victory of humanity despite the anti-humanistic dangers of the time", writes analyst John Herschel Baron.

[62] The last quartet, written when Bartók was preparing to flee the Nazi invasion of Hungary for a new and uncertain life in the U.S., is often seen as an autobiographical statement of the tragedy of his times.

Ives gave programmatic titles to much of his chamber music; his first string quartet, for example, is called "From the Salvation Army", and quotes American Protestant hymns in several places.

22 on YouTube, second movement, "Schnelle Achtel", played by Ana Farmer, David Boyden, Austin Han, and Dylan Mattingly Paul Hindemith was another neoclassicist.

His eighth quartet is an autobiographical work, that expresses his deep depression from his ostracization, bordering on suicide:[64] it quotes from previous compositions, and uses the four-note motif DSCH, the composer's initials.

As the century progressed, many composers created works for small ensembles that, while they formally might be considered chamber music, challenged many of the fundamental characteristics that had defined the genre over the last 150 years.

I put in just a minimal amount of dynamics and phrasing marks ...we spend a lot of time trying out different ideas in order to shape the music, to form it.

The players not only bow their amplified instruments, they also beat on them with thimbles, pluck them with paper clips and play on the wrong side of the bridge or between the fingers and the nut.

On the one hand, Baron contends that "chamber music in the home ... remained very important in Europe and America until the Second World War, after which the increasing invasion of radio and recording reduced its scope considerably.

In the radio program "Amateurs Help Keep Chamber Music Alive" from 2005, reporter Theresa Schiavone cites a Gallup poll showing an increase in the sale of stringed instruments in America.

Joe Lamond, president of the National Association of Music Manufacturers (NAMM) attributes the increase to a growth of home music-making by adults approaching retirement.

Baron suggests that one of the reasons for this surge is "the spiraling costs of orchestral concerts and the astronomical fees demanded by famous soloists, which have priced both out of the range of most audiences.

"[86] "For an individual, the problems of interpretation are challenging enough", writes Waterman, "but for a quartet grappling with some of the most profound, intimate and heartfelt compositions in the music literature, the communal nature of decision-making is often more testing than the decisions themselves.

"After twenty years in the [Guarneri] Quartet, I'm happily surprised on occasion to find myself totally wrong about what I think a player will do, or how he'll react in a particular passage", says violist Michael Tree.

Many compositions pose difficulties in coordination, with figures such as hemiolas, syncopation, fast unison passages and simultaneously sounded notes that form chords that are challenging to play in tune.

It is not always a simple matter for members of an ensemble to determine the proper balance while playing; frequently, they require an outside listener, or a recording of their rehearsal, to tell them that the relations between the instruments are correct.

It is an experience too personal to talk about and yet it colors every aspect of our relationship, every good-natured musical confrontation, all the professional gossip, the latest viola joke.