Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part. However, by convention, it usually does not include solo instrument performances.
Carl Wilhelm Eugen Stenhammar was a Swedish composer, conductor and pianist.
The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D 810, known as Death and the Maiden, is a piece by Franz Schubert that has been called "one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire". It was composed in 1824, after the composer suffered from a serious illness and realized that he was dying. It is named for the theme of the second movement, which Schubert took from a song he wrote in 1817 of the same title. But, writes Walter Willson Cobbett, all four movements of the quartet are welded "into a unity under the pressure of a dominating idea - the dance of death."
Miriam Beatrice Hyde was an Australian composer, classical pianist, music educator, and poet.
The National Gramophonic Society (NGS) was founded in England in 1923 by the novelist Compton Mackenzie to produce recordings of music which was ignored by commercial record companies. The Society was proposed shortly after Mackenzie had launched his monthly The Gramophone, and its activities were announced and its releases promoted in the magazine's pages.
Walter Willson Cobbett was an English businessman, amateur violinist and an influential patron of British chamber music from the decade before World War I until his death in 1937. He was an innovative and astute businessman with an enthusiasm for the composition and performance of chamber music. Cobbett's business successes enabled him to focus on his musical interests from about 1905.
The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D 804, Op. 29, was written by Franz Schubert between February and March 1824. It dates roughly to the same time as his monumental Death and the Maiden Quartet, emerging around three years after his previous attempt to write for the string quartet genre, the Quartettsatz, D 703, that he never finished.
Friedrich Kiel was a German composer and music teacher.
Ferdinand Thieriot was a German composer of Romantic music and a cellist.
The Chamber Music Journal is a periodical devoted exclusively to non-standard, rare or unknown chamber music of merit. Between 1990 and 2010, it was published in hardcopy and available by subscription only. Since 2011, it has been exclusively published online. All issues, past and current, are available at no cost. It is under the general editorship of R.H.R. Silvertrust.
Hans von Koessler was a German composer, conductor and music teacher. In Hungary, where he worked for 26 years, he was known as János Koessler.
Louis Christian August Glass was a Danish composer.
The lesser bamboo bat or lesser flat-headed bat is one of the smallest species of vesper bat, and is native to Southeast Asia.
Marion Margaret Scott was an English violinist, musicologist, writer, music critic, editor, composer, and poet.
The Spencer Dyke Quartet was a string quartet active in England through the 1920s. It was formed in 1918 and its personnel remained unchanged until August 1927 when Bernard Shore became the violist and Tate Gilder the second violin. It is best remembered now for a series of pioneering chamber music recordings made for the National Gramophonic Society. At the time of the recordings, the Quartet members were Edwin Spencer Dyke, Edwin Quaife, Ernest Tomlinson (viola) and Bertie Patterson Parker cello. Bernard Shore played viola in the last two recordings only.
Leon Bosch is a double bassist known for his expressive bel canto style. He was principal double bass of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, from 1995 until 2014 but is also known as a chamber musician, recitalist, concerto soloist, teacher, conductor and program consultant. He is artistic director of the chamber music ensembles I Musicanti and the Ubuntu Ensemble.
William Henley (1874–1957) was an English violinist, arranger of music, music teacher, and composer.
The Walter Willson Cobbett Medal is awarded annually by the Worshipful Company of Musicians "in recognition of services to Chamber Music". It was established in 1924 and endowed with £50 by Walter Willson Cobbett (1847–1937), an amateur violinist and expert on chamber music who went on to serve as the company's master in 1928–29. Cobbett had previously instigated the Cobbett Competition for chamber music, and later was the primary author of the two volume Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, first published in 1929.
Harry Waldo Warner was an English viola player and composer, one of the founding members of the London String Quartet and a several times Cobbett Competition winner for his chamber music.
The Berkeley Ensemble is a British chamber music ensemble that explores little-known twentieth- and twenty first-century British chamber music alongside a more established repertoire.
