Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any "art music" that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part. The word "chamber" signifies that the music can be performed in a small room, often with an intimate atmosphere. However, it usually does not include, by definition, solo instrument performances.

Resources

Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, edited by Walter Willson Cobbett in 1923, and updated and reprinted in 1963, is a comprehensive guide to chamber music compositions and composers up to that time.

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Sir Donald Francis Tovey, British pianist and musicologist, wrote many insightful essays on the subject of chamber music, some of them available in the volume of his Essays in Musical Analysis that he devotes to it.

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