Chamber Scenes: Musical Space, Medium, and Genre c. 1800

Abstract

In mid-February scholars and performers gathered in San José to address what some might think are long-answered questions. What was chamber music around the turn of the nineteenth century? What were its conventions, contours and uses? Who listened to it, played it and paid for it? The presenters and participants at ‘Chamber Scenes: Musical Space, Medium, and Genre c. 1800’ amply addressed these questions and others. The conference was hosted by the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San José State University, and adroitly organized by Erica Buurman, director of the Center, and Nicholas Mathew of the University of California Berkeley. Although this was not specifically a conference on Beethoven, Ludwig loomed large, as he is likely to at any conference on instrumental music around the year 1800, and particularly one held at a centre for Beethoven scholarship. In the wake of the unexpectedly curtailed ‘Beethoven year’ of 2020, there was palpable enjoyment among attendees at the meeting of colleagues and friends, and much to appreciate about being together in physical space to present and experience a variety of thought-provoking and enjoyable papers and performances. A number of presentations focused productively on questions of genre, with particular attention paid to dismantling (or at least complicating) the oppositional dualities common in chamber-music scholarship. As Ellen Lockhart (University of Toronto) observed in her paper, the widely accepted definition of chamber music both invokes and invites binaries: public/private, commercial/aesthetic, male/female and professional/amateur, among others. In the first of three lecture-recitals at the conference, Erica Buurman, assisted by the Takács Quartet and historical dance expert Joan Walton (San José State University), demonstrated the heretofore underexplored influences of ballroom and social dance on the second movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132. Considering the binary between ‘bodily’ music (in this case, music for dance) and ‘cerebral’ music, Buurman suggested that, contrary to the ideologies of critics such as Eduard Hanslick, chamber music drew on the former as well as the latter. Lockhart too engaged with a binary that might seem inherent in the genre: that of instrumental versus vocal music. Tracing the origins of the term ‘chamber music’, she suggested the term’s indebtedness to baroque vocal genres, and observed the continuing presence of vocality in later chamber music, as in the cavatina movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 130. Sarah Waltz (University of the Pacific) complicated the aforementioned public/ private binary in an English context, noting that the repertoire for ‘public’ stage concerts and ‘private’ house concerts may not have differed as widely as one might think. ‘Domestic’ chamber genres were often performed publicly, just as ‘larger’ genres, like the concerto, sometimes found their place in domestic venues. Other papers called into question a further entrenched binary: original compositions and arrangements. Nancy November (University of Auckland) suggested that performance parameters rather than compositional parameters were definitive for musicians around 1800. Used for both educational and performance purposes, small-ensemble arrangements of operas were indeed considered ‘real’ chamber music. A lecture-recital by Kumaran Arul (Stanford University) further