FORM IN MUSIC
HE fourteenth of a series of brief articles by BESSIE POLLARD, Mus. Bac., on "Form in Music." These articles are closely related to a‘series of programmes on the same topic now being heard from 2YC on Friday evenings. Each of our articles is illustrated by a few bars of the music under discussion,
EE 14. Chamber Music RIMARILY, Chamber Music was that designed for a nobleman’s domestic entertainment, as opposed to music of the Church or of the theatre. To-day by Chamber Music we mean compositions written for two or Fi more performers in equal association, and presented in a’small auditorium (or -deally, in a moderate-sized room in a
home) with not more than one player to a part. This is in direct contrast with works like the Overture, Symphony and Concerto where the particular parts are performed by several instruments of the same type. A Haydn String Quartet (first and second violins, viola and *cello) would be played by four separate performers, whereas in a Haydn Symphony, although the string parts are scored for exactly this combination of instruments, each of those parts would be interpreted by several players. Chamber Music (or "room-music") goes far back to that time when the instrumental art gradually separated from the vocal. Sixteenth-Seventeenth Century amateurs of sufficient substance owned "chests of viols," these holding, as a rule, two treble, two tenot and two _- ;
bass viols. An English writer of the day quaintly recommends this combination as the "properest instruments for a consort." When lutes- and recorders were added to the viols it was called a "broken consort." English madrigals were marked "apt for voyces or viols," implying that the same music was interchanged or performed together by voices and instruments. (The use of the human voice in the Chamber ensemble was almost entirely suspended during the Haydn-Brahms period, but
many later composers have restored it.) Even when the violin superseded the viol, the 17th Century Chamber combination most used was two violins and a bass. We come across many specimens of this particular Trio in the compositions of Corelli, Tartini and Purcell. The 18th Century saw the String Quartet permanently instituted .as @ definite art-form, first, by the composers of the Mannheim school headed by Johann Stamitz, and later by Haydn, who was more or less responsible for the inclusion of the viola as an instrument of the same commensurate significance in the ensemble as the violins and ’cello. All works, such as Sonatas, Trios, Quartets, Quintets, Sextets, Septets, Octets, Nonets and Decemets for Strings, wind or percussion instruments (with or without the piano), or for any in-
strumental amalgamation whatever when there is only one performer to a part, are classed as Chamber Music. In a Chamber work, the succession of movements follows the plan of the Sonata and the Symphony. Most of the revolutionary . musical trends (Romanticism, Impressionism, Expressionism) and experiments (Atonality, Polytonality anid Microtonality), have ‘affected the texture of Chamber Music, but its basic "implements"-in the Strings, anyway, have stayed constant since the time of Haydn. CHAMBER MUSIC-the 14th ot the series, FORM IN MUSIC-will be heard from Station 2¥YC on Friday, | December 5, at 9.30 p.m.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 440, 28 November 1947, Page 11
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529FORM IN MUSIC New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 440, 28 November 1947, Page 11
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