Chamber Music Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Preface: Toward the end of the eighteenth century, such great minds as Mozart and Beethoven entertained the notion that string trios might someday rival or eclipse string quartets. The quartet had grown from being mainly fluff to a vehicle for immortal masterpieces in only 15 years, and the string trio offers advantages in the chamber music virtues of frugality, simplicity, transparency, and equality. (In a violin, viola, cello trio, no one is a "second" anything, and the viola is an important melody instrument.) But few string trios were written in the nineteenth century, and these mostly at the lighter end of the classical music spectrum or in the antique style. Some older reference books give the impression that the form is well suited to children and amateurs, but for professionals, the repertoire is very small. That would tend to discourage artists from exploring the literature, and a shortage of expert players would, in turn, deter composers from writing new trios. Meanwhile, the string quartet has become the most evolved and perhaps the most subtle and profound of art forms. String quartet audiences have risen over the years, and major composers commonly write several string quartets each and list them among their "important works." Talented and well-trained performers are arriving in the U.S. from Eastern and Central Europe and East Asia in great numbers, and the annual output of American conservatories is immense and seems equal to any technical challenge. For performers, regrettably, the supply has grown faster than the demand, but for audiences, this surely is the golden age of string quartets. Why did trios languish? Evidently, it was difficult to write nineteenth-century Romantic music for only three voices. The tradition of four-voiced chords has been strong in western music for 500 years, and it takes more than usual skill to achieve tonal complexity with just three voices. The gorgeous chords and dramatic modulations which sustained Romanticism were too taxing for most composers and performers of string trios, and grandiosity and bombast are more easily achieved by other means. But things have changed: During the twentieth century, we became more accepting of linear, less chordal textures, and music with no tonality at all. We may have a fuller appreciation now of the Age of Enlightenment and its clarity and restraint. For the forward-looking, the timbral possibilities of the contrabass and electric instruments are intriguing. Less is more, small is beautiful, to put a large ensemble on an airplane is an extravagance in hard times, and the string trio is poised for a resurgence. The advent of the internet and digital data formats have created niche marketing opportunities even as the traditional publishers of records and sheet music have fallen prey to the mass-market orientation of the giant entertainment conglomerates. Perhaps Mozart and Beethoven were onto something after all. I hope that this compendium will demonstrate that the string trio literature is large, growing rapidly, and in interesting directions. A review of where we have been may be helpful in deciding where to go next.