16-foot doublings represent important musical instincts. To
ignore or misunderstand them is to deprive the earlier chamber
music of its euphony.

In the later chamber music the continuo instinct sometimes
reasserts itself (often without the composer's realizing its origin)
as an impurity of style; especially when he is in the habit of
composing at the piano.

For general purposes, chamber music may be defined as
instrumental music written for a group of individual performers,
and intended to be heard for its own sake in such rooms as are
to be found in private houses. Dance music, and music intended
'to accompany the clatter of dishes at a princely table', exclude
themselves from the category of music intended to be heard for
its own sake.

The size of the room is not a matter for rigid definition; the
hundred-and-fifty years during which the classics of chamber
music were composed were a period of royal and aristocratic
patronage, and the rooms for which the music was designed were
the rooms of palaces. And it is not an unmixed evil that chamber
music should be heard in halls that are too large for it. The
necessity can arise only because of a remarkable public demand
for the highest and most spiritual form of music, and the acoustic
disadvantages have a distinct value as a stimulus to the imagina-
tion. The listener naïve enough to expect the ff of Schubert's
D minor Quartet to sound loud in a concert-room holding an
audience of 2,000, learns in five minutes to prefer spiritual to
material values in music, if he can learn anything.

Nevertheless, the classical idea of chamber music implies big-
ness as well as intimacy, and the listener is not enjoying the
normal effect of a trio or quartet unless the sound is filling the
room. This classical notion of bigness determines the art-forms;
no classical chamber music is merely lyric. Beethoven's Fugue
in D major, op. 137, for string quintet takes less than four minutes
to play, and begins and ends softly; but fugues are not lyrics,
and Beethoven's sketches for this opusculum are entangled with
ideas of a fugal opening which afterwards took shape in the
scherzo of the Ninth Symphony. Other short pieces of chamber
music are either large sets of variations or fragments of projected
complete sonata-schemes. Schumann Märchenerzählungen and
Dvořák 'Dumky' Trio are exceptional groups of lyrics by
composers who otherwise accept the classical view that a chamber
work must contain at least one movement in developed sonata
form. This rule is a natural result of the feeling that when two
or more people are gathered together to play music, they may as

-2-