Is chamber music dead?

No. At least, we haven't seen any evidence of this assertion.

However, Anne Midgette of the New York Times wrote a very interesting article encompassing her own opinion of the issue. For the article, she interviewed several people with varying perspectives on the issue including the CEO of Chamber Music America, the artistic directors of Chamber Music at Lincoln Center, several concert presenters, a few young performers and composers, and me . One of the most striking parts of the article is where she documents different people's definitions of the term "Chamber Music" itself - it really does seem like nobody has a clue how to successfully define the term, but is this really any different from other genres? Terms like impressionism, pointillism, expressionism all have vast gray areas where renowned experts disagree on what falls within which category. Is Rock music Pop? Is Hip Hop Pop? Is Funk Hip Hop? You could work yourself into a frothy academic frenzy trying to taxonify art properly and still end up with no real definition that everyone can agree upon.

Her main point is that the term "chamber music" is in fact a huge barrier to audiences appreciating chamber music at all. This is an interesting idea, but I find that it is not entirely accurate. The truth is that most people in the United States have no associations whatever with chamber music, negative or positive. She suggests that calling chamber music something else might reinvigorate the field. To me, this seems to be a decent attempt at a new direction, but I doubt that would have any significant effect on either the profession or on audience size at concerts. The content of the concert, the energy level of the group, the focus of the concert (is it a shut-up-and-sit-down event or can you eat dinner while listening to late Beethoven?) are far more significant than what you call it.

All of these nit-picking concerns aside, I am very happy to see an article challenging some of the odd conventions that exist in the world of classical chamber music, and am honored that we were included in the examples of people looking for other ways of doing what we do. It's very exciting to be able to play anything we would play in a concert hall in a club - dumbing down isn't even a consideration when we're putting together our set lists (set list - you might call them "halves" of a traditional concert, and you'd have the same basic idea. Each set is one half of what we end up playing in the club, as we usually play 2 sets).

As an example of one of the tiny things that we can do which is not possible in a concert hall is when we play in clubs, there are no rules about what we can wear on stage. It's quite literally a dream come true for me, as I have always found that suits and tuxedos are designed explicitly to prevent blood from reaching the brain and to prevent audience members from feeling comfortable. We've done our best within the conventions of the concert hall to relax this feeling, but in the concert hall there is no easy way to duplicate the freedom of just being yourself you have when playing in a club.