Wow, a blog. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to maintain a web presence for over ten years now without keeping one, but somehow I have. I’ve certainly run my mouth off on other people’s, but haven’t seen it as either personally necessary or serving some greater good for me regularly to post my own ruminations on music, life, whatever, and so my presence in the blogosphere has been intermittent, quixotic. But now I and my wife and favorite musical partner, the great Caroline Stinson, have assumed the roles of Co-Artistic Directors of WCM, hoping in some way to fill the enormous shoes left by Judith Pearce (her feet are quite dainty, actually, but she’s left enormous tracks nonetheless), and at the same time we’ve created this blog, a way for us to share with you a continuing, evolving conversation on the power and joy, as well as the challenges and frustrations, of chamber music. So here I am.

It’s a funny term, “chamber music”. When I was a kid it scared me; I heard it uttered with great portent by the adults and the only association it conjured in me was “chamber of horrors”. I imagined music to accompany imprisonment in a pit, awaiting some ghastly fate at the hands of Vincent Price or Boris Karloff. Since that time I’ve discovered that in the worst case scenario it can actually seem that way, but that’s another story… My experiences of it now bring home to me, intensify in me, a constant, quickening sense of its uniqueness as a singularly powerful means of human communication. In its fierce lucidity, its blazing emotional truth, its intimacy, its physicality, the close proximity to the act of performance it makes possible for the audience, its capacity to open up for us long, precise and yet symbolically open strands of pure thought, pure imagination, in all these ways chamber music does what only music can, but in a manner and to a degree surpassing any other medium. Orchestral music is thrilling, powerful, at times awe-inspiring, but its rituals are those of the anonymous “we”; what we want from it is to gather in large numbers and move out of ourselves into a collective experience of force and mass. It is public music writ large, and though our individual experiences of it are unique to each of us, and may in fact be quite intimate in nature, they are created and conditioned by their birth in a public ceremony in which “one” is subsumed in “many”.

Chamber music, on the other hand, opens up a direct line from the inner life of the listener, through the deeply physical relationship of the performers, into what one imagines to be, at least, the inner life of the composer. Much has been made of the degree to which much of the greatest chamber music (the quartets of Beethoven and Bartok; the piano trios and piano quintet of Brahms; the quartets of Carter) seems to exist as a kind of musical diary of its creator. This is actually not only un-provable, but probably has as much to do with how we read the medium than with the medium itself. An eighty-piece orchestra could just as well carry my most profound and personal reflections on life as a four-member ensemble, but there is no question but that in performance the latter feels much the more personal. And, while the whole idea is patently unquantifiable, I believe it, know it in fact, in my bones. The Beethoven of the 3rd and 9th symphonies is speaking to us directly of the timeless and the tragic, in a voice so searingly personal that we feel the man in the room with us, looking us right in the eye. But he still seems to carrying on about big, public concerns (Napoleon: yes or no?; the desire for universal brother/sisterhood and the role of art in bringing it about); in the Heiliger Dankgesang of the quartet op. 132 he speaks of illness; fear; and the eventual joy of healing, and we know, both from his biography and from the notations in the score, that it is his sickness and recovery for which we are giving thanks. And then, of course, in the magical transference and transformation that are what art is, in all its forms, his suffering and healing are also ours. For this alone chamber music is invaluable to us.

I also love it because it is difficult; because it flies in the face of the whole notion of “economy of scale”; because in a contemporary economic sense it makes no sense at all; and because it forces a constant reappraisal of what we mean when we lob words around like “egalitarian” and “elitist”, for chamber music is most certainly both of those at once, and the inherent tension in that is wonderful and bracing. What I mean is that, while our concerts are open to all and affordable to virtually all (really, when compared with even a cheap dinner and a movie our pricing is among the most plebian, and far lower than many events with more of an “everyman” sort of cast, such as NASCAR or the next stadium concert of the Stones), the experience is work, work that yields almost instant dividends and is repaid hundreds of times over, over time, but work nonetheless. I like that, and will neither shrink from nor apologize for it. For just look, look at the faces, the body language, the furrowed brows, the smiles of delight, the tears, the real presence of the transcendent among the audiences at WCM, or any of the scores of other first-rate chamber concerts one can attend in this country, and you’ll see, you’ll hear that the work is joy, and worth every fired synapse. So no, there’s no heart-over-head here, no easy answers, just joy, sorrow, loss, exultation, desire, and the sharing with a couple hundred intimate strangers of the clearest, most beautifully realized vision of what is possible for us as humans. That’s all; no biggie.

So there’s much to discuss here. As wildly imperfect as it is, we still depend on language, on conversation, to help us prolong and define our musical experiences for us; there’s something about going on about it that helps keep the musical act present and real for us, and so we write and write and talk and talk and talk. So let’s do that here. Weigh in, on the concerts, the pre- and post-concert events, what you find on this blog. It’s all fair game, just be respectful and (need we say it?) nice, even in violent disagreement. We have a blog. Let’s see what we can make of it. – AW