# Colouristic resources in uncommon chamber groups



## Rhombic (Oct 28, 2013)

Chamber groups have always been relatively common, because of the relative ease to find musicians to play with you and because it tends to be less complicated to organise than, say, an orchestra or a major choir. Most chamber works, especially in Classicism and early Romanticism, fall into some groupings that have traditionally been established. These include violin duets, the string quartet, etc.

Nowadays, many groups such as the brass quintet, the wind quintet and some other extravagantly unbalanced chamber groups are very common. However, compositional techniques for these groups vary quite a lot because of their sound qualities and planes. This implies that the first composers to compose for certain groups were not only quite talented, but also avant-garde in their own particular way.
This includes Anton Reicha, who exploited the French horn trios and established quite a trend in wind quintet composition. However, many other quirky groups can be identified (most of them in 20th Century music) such as trumpet, horn and trombone (Poulenc), flute, viola and double bass (Erwin Schulhoff, his Concertino), etc.

What do you think about how chamber music has evolved and how composers have designed their unique compositional technique in order to smoothen out irregularities in colour and style of each instrument?
Feel free to comment, give your opinion and show further questions regarding this topic.


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## Rhombic (Oct 28, 2013)

I can't see any button to edit my post  but well, I just wanted to clarify what I meant by the actual style of the composers. I wanted to treat each composer in relation to their output for a certain group of instruments and how he orchestrates it (as well as how the was in which he composes for that group differs from his other works, therefore probably showing intrinsic characteristics of the instruments).


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