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Sometimes there’s a slight grey area between chamber and orchestral music. After all, isn’t there such a thing as a chamber orchestra? Rather than muddy the waters further though, we’re going to go back to basics and explain the difference between chamber and orchestral music.<\/p>
On a very simple level, the differences between chamber music<\/a><\/strong> and orchestral music come down to the number of players featured in a composition. Generally speaking, chamber music starts from two players and takes in trios<\/a><\/strong>, quartets, quintets, sextets, septets, nonets and more along its way.<\/p> The term chamber derives from the French word \u2018chambre\u2019 for room. Chamber music is designed to be performed in smaller spaces, as opposed to a concert hall. Before concert halls started to appear in the 19th<\/sup> century, music was written to be played in three places: the church, the theatre and the courts of the royalty and aristocracy. It\u2019s the last of these that chamber music was originally designed for. Take Haydn<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s string quartets for the Esterh\u00e1zy family or Lully\u2019s flute sonatas for Louis XIV<\/a><\/strong> at the court of Versailles for instance. Today, chamber music broadly refers to any music played with one instrument to each part \u2013 and on a small-ish scale.<\/p> Don\u2019t let the term \u2018chamber orchestra\u2019 confuse you, however. A chamber orchestra can be small enough to play chamber music, but often they\u2019re large enough to play orchestral music. The dividing lines are very thin.<\/p> Now when it comes to orchestral music, an \u2018orchestra<\/a><\/strong>\u2019 simply means any collection of instruments. To be more specific, it really refers to a body of players that perform larger-scale music. These works might be symphonies, concertos (as the accompanying ensemble) or large tone-poems<\/a><\/strong>. This is music where instrumental parts, particularly strings, are played by more than one player.<\/p>What’s a chamber orchestra?<\/h2>