XXV Years of Classical Chamber Music©
An essay by Timothy Summers
Twenty-five years have passed since we started the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival.
First, some statistics. They show something very good indeed: we’ve presented over 550 pieces of music with no less than 160 musicians (many of whom have returned several times), in over 135 ticketed performances for thousands of music lovers. We’ve given dozens of free concerts and external events, many of which were for schoolchildren and youth organizations. We even kept the music going during the heart of the pandemic through virtual Festivals. Through it all, an astonishing level of support from our board, our friends and supporters of all kinds.
But it’s also true that these last 25 years have been pretty strange. They have brought truly revolutionary changes in technology and telecommunications, which have in turn brought incalculable amounts of human knowledge and fire-bright garbage to light. It has become more and more frequently necessary to reconsider basic notions about knowledge, history, and memory, while every object, act, gesture and thought is shrink-wrapped as data. And of course, the time was marked viciously at its beginning, as the new millennium rose, in September of 2001, and cruelly at its end, with the worldwide spread of the coronavirus. Even as these years seem to have passed in the blink of an eye, each of us has blinked a couple hundred million times, give or take. We look back, blinking, blinkered, even a bit blinded.
There is, however, something in music which may yet skirt all of this: something dynamic, pointless, half-named, un-tokenizable, invisible and tactile. Perhaps there is even something of this quality in writing, too — or maybe there is something of this quality in everything, if we can manage to find and value it. In any case, there is almost certainly something meaningfully evasive in music, with its palpable refusal of the particular, that bears a possibility of continuity. Music offers something that persists in memory, moment after moment and year after year, in spite of all that we’ve seen. This quality has given us twenty-five years of chamber music here in Charlottesville, where we grew up.
One of the minor consequences of the major cultural changes of recent years, though, is that there has been a radical shift in the nameable activities and interests associated with music, and especially those around ‘classical’ music. We used to depend rather heavily on apparent historical and cultural stability. There was a time (say, twenty-five years ago) when the words ‘classical music’ would bring a cascade of reliably mainstream associations: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, symphonies, concert halls, virtuosity, ‘practice’, Carnegie Hall, Pavarotti, ‘the Tchaikovsky competition’, Leonard Bernstein, Zamfir (master of the pan flute), National Public Radio, Yo-Yo, string quartets, ‘New Music’ and of course chamber music. Even the most radical musical experiments of the 20th century, such as those from Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen, would establish their meanings in ways that were adjacent to (or aimed at) a familiar core of traditions, venues, theories and sounds. By referencing stable structures, social and musical, the avant-garde could assume that it was ahead of, or against, something, and its brand of oddball virtuosi could riff on those known structures.
But this has all changed.
The shifting sands of technology, media, and society have revealed an entirely new archaeology of incentives beneath our behavior and tastes. This change has been profound enough to point toward a rather different musical future, based in a very different idea of the musical past. It has become completely automatic, for example, to catalog the sociological biases (by no means benign) in word-clouds like the one given above. The main concepts in this list have given up power and influence not only to a broader concept of historical lineage, but also to more readily amplifiable, visualizable and viral cultural products. The world has found other centers, based in other social hierarchies.
To make matters more difficult, ‘Classical music’ has long struggled to find (or even willfully resisted) a resonant public context. Cranks, eccentrics, prodigies, numerologists, romantics, hermits and suicides have played leading roles, and this has had some unsurprisingly asocial side-effects. An academic (‘classical’) authority once served to undergird this strange culture of aesthetic explorers, but by now there is too little that’s stable for us to speak of ‘classical' music without wondering why it is even a nameable entity. Insofar as the old ‘canon’ catches public attention, it often invites an investigation of various societal and historical sins and -isms. It is difficult to measure the scope or impact of music-based hegemony, but you don’t have to be a data scientist to see what sort of pale fellows always ended up at the center of attention — even as they themselves may have led rather dreadful lives.
It was with a 'classical' spirit that Europe painted and pasted Apollo, Dionysus, Orpheus, multitudes of muses and portraits of the powerful to the walls and ceilings of its concert halls. These sights remain fairly lovely to see. But their myths and monarchs, which have always been a bit pale and suspicious in the American landscape, no longer carry much meaning for media-drenched audiences anywhere (though Echo and Narcissus, as techno-pathological archetypes, remain prominent). The profile of ‘Classical music’ itself seems oddly reminiscent of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, from whence so much of it arose, for at least a few reasons: 1) like the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither holy, nor ‘classical’, nor an empire; 2) its history is significantly oriented around Vienna and Budapest; and 3) it has been greatly diminished in recent times. There are limits to this comparison, of course. For starters, it wasn't only the Habsburgs: Hohenzollerns in the North, not to be outdone, were also heavily involved: in Berlin on the Staatsoper it is still inscribed in gold: “Fredericus Rex Apollini et Musis’ (dedicated to King Frederick, Apollo, and the muses). In Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Wagner and of course in the works and legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach (who, after all, wrote his ‘Musical Offering’ for this same muse-blessed Frederick), the powerful all sought a sort of imperial imprimatur. Of course, there was also Venice, and opera… it is a long and complex story, insofar as there’s a single story to be told. But however it’s told, it’s mostly rather European, and very heavily print-based.
As a secondary consequence of the many recent reconsiderations, we have sometimes discussed giving up on the word ‘chamber’ in the Festival’s title. ‘Chamber Music’ can too easily seem like an effete, exhausted subset of an effete, exhausted subculture. The word ‘chamber’ itself doesn’t bring much warmth, though its connotations vary widely. It can seem foreign and archaic (Wunderkammer); legal (in chambers); grisly/euphemistic (torture chamber); bureaucratic (chamber of commerce); lonely (echo chamber); or sleepy and stagnant (chamber pot, Senate chamber), but it almost always comes across as a little formal or vacant. There was once a time when ‘chamber music’ had connotations of focus, fineness and even of secret power, particularly in tales of Albert Einstein’s affinity for string quartets. But now, in 2024, ‘chamber music’ often seems to be staking a shaky claim. Sometimes one hears of its ‘intimacy’ as a saving grace, but this can often seem more forced and icky than actually communicative.
Nonetheless, in this era of cold virtual spaces, the word ‘chamber’ seems a word worth holding. ‘Chamber music’ is music which makes full use of human activity in a space, and that is valuable. It uses a kind of shared attention which is increasingly unusual in this age of separateness and screens. The hollowness of the word ‘chamber’ implies at least a possibility of resonance, and we would like to use that possibility. Perhaps the word ‘interactivity’, its digital connotations notwithstanding, may be a better carrier of what is sometimes described as ‘intimacy’. Real relationships in real space between real people are not some sort of ‘solved problem’, deserving only digital attention. ‘Chamber music’ is about real interaction, close engagement, and personal scale, in a shared space whose emptiness can fill with sound.
Lastly: perhaps the word ‘classical’ is not so bad, either. It contains an evident connection, still, to the idea of rhetoric, which does undeniably have strong roots in Plato, Aristotle, and many more of the usual ‘classical’ suspects. There’s no point in going on too long about this, because this is no space (and this is no author) to expound on the wide subject of rhetoric. Additionally, it’s hard to say how rigorous its categories ever were. Rhetoric is a fancy word for something with a very messy history. Nonetheless, something of its millennia-spanning legacy is clearly present in our music. Here are some of its basic categories:
inventio (invention) — process that leads to development and refinement of an argument.
dispositio (arrangement) — usually beginning with an 'exordium'
elocutio (style) — (hard to define…)
memoria (memory) — learning and memorizing persuasive messages
pronuntiatio (presentation) and actio (delivery) — gestures, pronunciation, tone, and pace
(source: Wikipedia, modified text, used under CC BY-SA license)
These ideas still hold meaning, on stage and in public. They still more or less correspond to our musical processes of preparation and presentation. Insofar as they may be applied to almost any mode of prepared presentation, these classical categories don’t seem like unimportant or niche ideas.
We must closely consider what kind of information persuades us. Rhetoric is for politics, conviction and persuasion, without regard for truth, rigor or even content. That remains a hugely consequential matter, reaching from Cicero to Marshall McLuhan to now. The nameless rhetoric of music still exposes some of the surrounding culture’s spirit, asking what sort of outright nonsense can leave us ‘convinced’ simply by the manner in which it is given.
So, for twenty-five years we have presented works, exploring music as the world turns. We have pronounced it all as clearly as we could, trying to make it speak. In this way, we have pursued a ‘classical’ manner of making music. This path has many pleasures, many faults and many variants. It remains open: notes, after all, don’t really reveal anything beyond the presence of a single event whose wake we can somehow trace, so it’s hard to reach any conclusions which reach beyond a given concert. Our ultimate product is never seen, and lives in the gaps between notation, reading, execution and hearing. In a world exploding with mechanical inventions, colorful icons and the amplifications of media, we continue with a mysterious sort of work, exploring structures of conviction in the motion of air.
Summoning the ancient powers of rhetoric, J.S. Bach wrote small keyboard works called 'inventions'. Each of these inventions begin with an exordium, or presentation of fundamental material; this year, Bach’s music will serve as our exordium for the Festival. We will see and hear how things have developed, how they remain in memory, and what can be further invented along the way. Perhaps we will even be lucky enough to find things which can be built upon over time, in the inevitable strangeness of what-is-to-come. We will start with Puzzles and Inventions; then reach a kind of Fullness; then move on to Variations; and then finish with the warmth which was there all along. In this way we create a trajectory for times to come.
First, some statistics. They show something very good indeed: we’ve presented over 550 pieces of music with no less than 160 musicians (many of whom have returned several times), in over 135 ticketed performances for thousands of music lovers. We’ve given dozens of free concerts and external events, many of which were for schoolchildren and youth organizations. We even kept the music going during the heart of the pandemic through virtual Festivals. Through it all, an astonishing level of support from our board, our friends and supporters of all kinds.
But it’s also true that these last 25 years have been pretty strange. They have brought truly revolutionary changes in technology and telecommunications, which have in turn brought incalculable amounts of human knowledge and fire-bright garbage to light. It has become more and more frequently necessary to reconsider basic notions about knowledge, history, and memory, while every object, act, gesture and thought is shrink-wrapped as data. And of course, the time was marked viciously at its beginning, as the new millennium rose, in September of 2001, and cruelly at its end, with the worldwide spread of the coronavirus. Even as these years seem to have passed in the blink of an eye, each of us has blinked a couple hundred million times, give or take. We look back, blinking, blinkered, even a bit blinded.
There is, however, something in music which may yet skirt all of this: something dynamic, pointless, half-named, un-tokenizable, invisible and tactile. Perhaps there is even something of this quality in writing, too — or maybe there is something of this quality in everything, if we can manage to find and value it. In any case, there is almost certainly something meaningfully evasive in music, with its palpable refusal of the particular, that bears a possibility of continuity. Music offers something that persists in memory, moment after moment and year after year, in spite of all that we’ve seen. This quality has given us twenty-five years of chamber music here in Charlottesville, where we grew up.
One of the minor consequences of the major cultural changes of recent years, though, is that there has been a radical shift in the nameable activities and interests associated with music, and especially those around ‘classical’ music. We used to depend rather heavily on apparent historical and cultural stability. There was a time (say, twenty-five years ago) when the words ‘classical music’ would bring a cascade of reliably mainstream associations: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, symphonies, concert halls, virtuosity, ‘practice’, Carnegie Hall, Pavarotti, ‘the Tchaikovsky competition’, Leonard Bernstein, Zamfir (master of the pan flute), National Public Radio, Yo-Yo, string quartets, ‘New Music’ and of course chamber music. Even the most radical musical experiments of the 20th century, such as those from Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen, would establish their meanings in ways that were adjacent to (or aimed at) a familiar core of traditions, venues, theories and sounds. By referencing stable structures, social and musical, the avant-garde could assume that it was ahead of, or against, something, and its brand of oddball virtuosi could riff on those known structures.
But this has all changed.
The shifting sands of technology, media, and society have revealed an entirely new archaeology of incentives beneath our behavior and tastes. This change has been profound enough to point toward a rather different musical future, based in a very different idea of the musical past. It has become completely automatic, for example, to catalog the sociological biases (by no means benign) in word-clouds like the one given above. The main concepts in this list have given up power and influence not only to a broader concept of historical lineage, but also to more readily amplifiable, visualizable and viral cultural products. The world has found other centers, based in other social hierarchies.
To make matters more difficult, ‘Classical music’ has long struggled to find (or even willfully resisted) a resonant public context. Cranks, eccentrics, prodigies, numerologists, romantics, hermits and suicides have played leading roles, and this has had some unsurprisingly asocial side-effects. An academic (‘classical’) authority once served to undergird this strange culture of aesthetic explorers, but by now there is too little that’s stable for us to speak of ‘classical' music without wondering why it is even a nameable entity. Insofar as the old ‘canon’ catches public attention, it often invites an investigation of various societal and historical sins and -isms. It is difficult to measure the scope or impact of music-based hegemony, but you don’t have to be a data scientist to see what sort of pale fellows always ended up at the center of attention — even as they themselves may have led rather dreadful lives.
It was with a 'classical' spirit that Europe painted and pasted Apollo, Dionysus, Orpheus, multitudes of muses and portraits of the powerful to the walls and ceilings of its concert halls. These sights remain fairly lovely to see. But their myths and monarchs, which have always been a bit pale and suspicious in the American landscape, no longer carry much meaning for media-drenched audiences anywhere (though Echo and Narcissus, as techno-pathological archetypes, remain prominent). The profile of ‘Classical music’ itself seems oddly reminiscent of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, from whence so much of it arose, for at least a few reasons: 1) like the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither holy, nor ‘classical’, nor an empire; 2) its history is significantly oriented around Vienna and Budapest; and 3) it has been greatly diminished in recent times. There are limits to this comparison, of course. For starters, it wasn't only the Habsburgs: Hohenzollerns in the North, not to be outdone, were also heavily involved: in Berlin on the Staatsoper it is still inscribed in gold: “Fredericus Rex Apollini et Musis’ (dedicated to King Frederick, Apollo, and the muses). In Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Wagner and of course in the works and legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach (who, after all, wrote his ‘Musical Offering’ for this same muse-blessed Frederick), the powerful all sought a sort of imperial imprimatur. Of course, there was also Venice, and opera… it is a long and complex story, insofar as there’s a single story to be told. But however it’s told, it’s mostly rather European, and very heavily print-based.
As a secondary consequence of the many recent reconsiderations, we have sometimes discussed giving up on the word ‘chamber’ in the Festival’s title. ‘Chamber Music’ can too easily seem like an effete, exhausted subset of an effete, exhausted subculture. The word ‘chamber’ itself doesn’t bring much warmth, though its connotations vary widely. It can seem foreign and archaic (Wunderkammer); legal (in chambers); grisly/euphemistic (torture chamber); bureaucratic (chamber of commerce); lonely (echo chamber); or sleepy and stagnant (chamber pot, Senate chamber), but it almost always comes across as a little formal or vacant. There was once a time when ‘chamber music’ had connotations of focus, fineness and even of secret power, particularly in tales of Albert Einstein’s affinity for string quartets. But now, in 2024, ‘chamber music’ often seems to be staking a shaky claim. Sometimes one hears of its ‘intimacy’ as a saving grace, but this can often seem more forced and icky than actually communicative.
Nonetheless, in this era of cold virtual spaces, the word ‘chamber’ seems a word worth holding. ‘Chamber music’ is music which makes full use of human activity in a space, and that is valuable. It uses a kind of shared attention which is increasingly unusual in this age of separateness and screens. The hollowness of the word ‘chamber’ implies at least a possibility of resonance, and we would like to use that possibility. Perhaps the word ‘interactivity’, its digital connotations notwithstanding, may be a better carrier of what is sometimes described as ‘intimacy’. Real relationships in real space between real people are not some sort of ‘solved problem’, deserving only digital attention. ‘Chamber music’ is about real interaction, close engagement, and personal scale, in a shared space whose emptiness can fill with sound.
Lastly: perhaps the word ‘classical’ is not so bad, either. It contains an evident connection, still, to the idea of rhetoric, which does undeniably have strong roots in Plato, Aristotle, and many more of the usual ‘classical’ suspects. There’s no point in going on too long about this, because this is no space (and this is no author) to expound on the wide subject of rhetoric. Additionally, it’s hard to say how rigorous its categories ever were. Rhetoric is a fancy word for something with a very messy history. Nonetheless, something of its millennia-spanning legacy is clearly present in our music. Here are some of its basic categories:
inventio (invention) — process that leads to development and refinement of an argument.
dispositio (arrangement) — usually beginning with an 'exordium'
elocutio (style) — (hard to define…)
memoria (memory) — learning and memorizing persuasive messages
pronuntiatio (presentation) and actio (delivery) — gestures, pronunciation, tone, and pace
(source: Wikipedia, modified text, used under CC BY-SA license)
These ideas still hold meaning, on stage and in public. They still more or less correspond to our musical processes of preparation and presentation. Insofar as they may be applied to almost any mode of prepared presentation, these classical categories don’t seem like unimportant or niche ideas.
We must closely consider what kind of information persuades us. Rhetoric is for politics, conviction and persuasion, without regard for truth, rigor or even content. That remains a hugely consequential matter, reaching from Cicero to Marshall McLuhan to now. The nameless rhetoric of music still exposes some of the surrounding culture’s spirit, asking what sort of outright nonsense can leave us ‘convinced’ simply by the manner in which it is given.
So, for twenty-five years we have presented works, exploring music as the world turns. We have pronounced it all as clearly as we could, trying to make it speak. In this way, we have pursued a ‘classical’ manner of making music. This path has many pleasures, many faults and many variants. It remains open: notes, after all, don’t really reveal anything beyond the presence of a single event whose wake we can somehow trace, so it’s hard to reach any conclusions which reach beyond a given concert. Our ultimate product is never seen, and lives in the gaps between notation, reading, execution and hearing. In a world exploding with mechanical inventions, colorful icons and the amplifications of media, we continue with a mysterious sort of work, exploring structures of conviction in the motion of air.
Summoning the ancient powers of rhetoric, J.S. Bach wrote small keyboard works called 'inventions'. Each of these inventions begin with an exordium, or presentation of fundamental material; this year, Bach’s music will serve as our exordium for the Festival. We will see and hear how things have developed, how they remain in memory, and what can be further invented along the way. Perhaps we will even be lucky enough to find things which can be built upon over time, in the inevitable strangeness of what-is-to-come. We will start with Puzzles and Inventions; then reach a kind of Fullness; then move on to Variations; and then finish with the warmth which was there all along. In this way we create a trajectory for times to come.