Music for Small Spaces… aka ‘Chamber Music’.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary.

If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… what I am calling… Music for Small Spaces. You might have heard the term by which this music is generally referred to and that is ‘chamber music’. Now I don’t know why I have come, over the years to be somehow, irritated by the term. It is what it is. But I do have a couple of theories I’ll share with you later in the episode. But in the interests of transparency pretty much everyone else presenting this music to you will call it ‘chamber music’.

Now when I was looking for alternatives… specifically so people seeing the episode in their podcast feed would not skip past it… I came upon some other suggestions that sort of rivalled ‘music for small spaces’. One was ‘Intimate Music’ and the other was ‘Conversation Music’. In a way if you put all three terms together you get a composite idea of this music…

A huge collection of music originally intended for smaller performance spaces… sometimes even just a dining room… but not a concert hall or a church… and by virtue of that the connection between players and audience is more ‘intimate’… and finally the idea of ‘conversation music’ comes from the fact that this music is written for a small number of instruments… remember the small room… and with only say three or four individual instruments the compositions are in a way a sort balanced conversation between the different instruments.

Ok. The music. I’m going to start this music for small spaces show with something for 2 violins, a viola and a cello. Yes a string quartet. In 1985 the American composer Phillip Glass took the soundtrack he had written for the film ‘Mishima’ and adapted it to become his 3^rd String Quartet. Here is the concluding section played by The Kronos Quartet. It is about three minutes long.

A

That was the concluding section from the 3^rd String Quartet by Phillip Glass played by The Kronos Quartet.

So, as I am preparing this episode I have quickly come to the conclusion that the cumbersome term ‘Music for Small Rooms’ I have adopted is going to get frankly annoying and if you ever seek this music out from other sources… and I sincerely hope that you do… then ‘chamber music’ is what it is going to be called.

I’ll get into the origin of the term in a while… and it did once upon a time make sense but before that I want to read you a terrific quote from the American writer, critic and musician David Hurwitz from his book ‘Beethoven or Bust’… a very fine overview of and introduction to classical music by the way… He has this to say at the beginning of his chapter on ‘chamber music’…

Perhaps no single corner of the classical repertoire has inspired so much snobbery, mystification, and just plain nonsense as what has become known as chamber music. The very term, which implies something small, usually appears hand in hand with aficionados claims to having experienced pure sublimity past the point of mortal understanding.

So be warned. If you get into this music you’ll eventually encounter some obsessed people. Now, I’d argue that all corners of the classical music world can attract this sort of quasi-religious intoxication that can seriously though perhaps unintentionally only repulse people new to the music… but I agree with Mr Hurwitz that chamber music does seem to get more than its fair share. There really can be quite a bit of drinking the Kool-Aid mixed with a healthy dose of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.

But if, and it’s a big if… if you are lucky enough to hear some of this music… in a small space… or failing that… from a seat very close to the musicians… then you are going to have a qualitatively different experience from hearing an orchestra in a 1500 seat hall or an opera in a 2500 seat venue. So, if you get a chance to get really close to this sort of music it can be pretty special.

And oddly… listening to well recorded music written for a small group of instruments in a small space with a good pair of headphones or earbuds even from a podcast can be a vaguely similar experience.

To that end… some more music. Here is a little something Ludwig van Beethoven whipped up in 1808 between his 5^th and 6^th symphonies.

Here is the first section of his 5^th Piano Trio… which is music written for a piano (which you would have guessed) a violin and a viola.

It is performed by the pianist Wilhelm Kempf, the violinist Henryck Szerying and the cellist Pierre Fournier and is about eight minutes long

            B

That was the first section of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 5^th Piano Trio. It was performed by the pianist Wilhelm Kempf, the violinist Henryck Szerying and the cellist Pierre Fournier. That piece is also known as Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ piano trio. The ‘ghost’ name came 30 years after Beethoven had died when one of his former students Carl Czerny decided that a part of it reminded him of a scene from Shakespeare’s play ‘Hamlet’.

            And one note in passing… the writer David Hurwitz who I quoted in the last break is very active as a reviewer of recordings of classical music and has an extraordinary YouTube channel. And you can find a link on the Resources page on this podcast’s website… classicalforeveryone.net.

            So the next bit of music in this ‘Music for Small Spaces aka Chamber Music’ podcast is another string quartet. This one is by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart wrote 23 string quartets and this is the opening section of the 19^th from 1785. So that’s 200 years before the Phillip Glass I played at the beginning of the show.

            At some point in the decades after Mozart’s death this quartet was given the name ‘Dissonance’. This refers to the opening couple of minutes of the section I am going to play where you’ll perhaps be able to hear that notes that would not ordinarily be put together have been used by Mozart to create an unsteadiness and a certain musical uncertainty. At the time Mozart wrote the quartet this was extremely radical. To the listeners of the day, the opening section would have sounded… to put it simply… like the notes were deliberately ‘wrong’. Indeed one critic by the name of Guiseppi Sarti wrote…

“the author (whom I neither know nor wish to know) is nothing more than a piano player with spoiled ears”.

 After the two minutes of deliberate dissonance Mozart for the remaining nine minutes returns to the traditional harmonies of the day and writes music that mixes the aesthetics of Joseph Haydn and the interweaving melodies of Bach with his own expressiveness. It really is pretty magnificent. I hope you like it.  Here is the Alban Berg Quartet with the opening section of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance Quartet’.         

C

That was the Alban Berg Quartet with the opening section of Mozart’s ‘Dissonance Quartet’.

Alright I want to give you a bit more about the history of ‘chamber music’… the genre and the name

The name is actually one of those slightly strange classical music terms that originated as a translation from another language.

 In the late 1600s ‘musica da camera’ was being used by Italian speakers. It simply mean ‘music for a room’, implying ‘not for a church’ because there was another term for that… ‘musica di chiesa’. And remember that this is before orchestras grew to the monsters we think of today and before a middle class could support concert halls. And when the English translation, ’chamber music’ appeared, the term ‘chamber’ meaning a ‘room’ was in far more general use. I don’t think many people use the word ‘chamber’ these days. And it also implies that this was the music for people who could afford to have a room of their own dedicated to music performance. So it accidentally raises issues of class and accessibility. Not a lot of help in the 21^st century.

You can perhaps see why I half prefer Music for Small Spaces.

 Alright that it I promise the last of my digression into the applicability or otherwise of a term I am never going to change.

 More… chamber music.

In 1891 Johannes Brahms had pretty much retired from composing. He was in his late 50s and it seemed that he had run out of inspiration. And then he encountered the playing of a virtuoso clarinettist by the name of Richard Muhlfeld.

And this seemed to unlock the creative floodgates and Brahms wrote a series of pieces for Muhlfeld including the one I am going to play a part of for you now.

It is a clarinet quintet… which is a string quartet plus a clarinet… because of course there are an almost unlimited number of different instrument combinations you can put together for music for small spaces.

In this recording Richard Stoltzman plays the clarinet with the members of the Cleveland String Quartet. Here is the second section of Johannes Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet.

It is about 13 minutes long.

D

That was Richard Stoltzman playing the clarinet with the members of the Cleveland String Quartet performing the opening section of Johannes Brahms Clarinet Quintet

If you are enjoying this music and you want somewhere online dedicated to Chamber Music then a musicologist, educator, programmer and performer by the name of Kai Christiansen has put together an incredible web-based resource called earsesne.org you should explore. That is earsense.org. There is also a link to the site on the Resources page of classicalforeveryone.net. It is just a vast repository of extraordinary information. 

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast.

I have a couple more pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you 60 seconds of information that I hope you find useful…

If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are now sixteen, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net.

There you will also find some mini-episodes that address some of what I want to call the vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is almost everything in Italian?’.

And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes.           

 I hope you have enjoyed this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish this episode…

Time for some chamber music from the 21^st century.

And I have chosen composer Paul Stanhope’s third String Quartet from 2015 subtitled ‘From The Kimberly’… referring to the remote area of northern Australia.

At the time Stanhope had been working on a large choral work called Jandamarra about an indigenous resistance fighter. The same story plus his direct experience of the Kimberly region inspired the quartet.

Here is the beautiful slow section of the piece called ‘Dirrari Lament’ performed by the Australian String Quartet. Paul Stanhope’s String Quartet No. 3.

E

That was the Australian String Quartet with the slow section of Paul Stanhope’s String Quartet No. 3.

            Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.

            This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

            And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… If you are making music for small spaces then you can of course do it with just one instrument… or two. As in this concluding section of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ for piano and violin performed here by the pianist Fazil Say and the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaya.

            Thanks for listening.