Chamber music
The chamber music experience

Players of chamber music, both amateur and professional, attest to a unique enchantment with playing in ensemble. "It is not an exaggeration to say that there opened out before me an enchanted world", writes Walter Willson Cobbett, instigator of the Cobbett Competition, Cobbett Medal and editor of Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music.

Ensembles develop a close intimacy of shared musical experience. "It is on the concert stage where the moments of true intimacy occur", writes Steinhardt. "When a performance is in progress, all four of us together enter a zone of magic somewhere between our music stands and become a conduit, messenger, and missionary... It is an experience too personal to talk about and yet it colors every aspect of our relationship, every good-natured musical confrontation, all the professional gossip, the latest viola joke."

The playing of chamber music has been the inspiration for numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction. An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, explores the life and love of the second violinist of a fictional quartet, the Maggiore. Central to the story is the tensions and the intimacy developed between the four members of the quartet. "A strange composite being we are, not ourselves any more, but the Maggiore, composed of so many disjunct parts: chairs, stands, music, bows, instruments, musicians..." The Rosendorf Quartet, by Nathan Shaham, describes the trials of a string quartet in Palestine, before the establishment of the state of Israel. For the Love of It by Wayne Booth is a nonfictional account of the author's romance with cello playing and chamber music.
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