A research oral on the existence and nature of chamber music before 1750.

During my many hours of research for this task, I found some very helpful resources on the subject of chamber music. Most of these books and web sites were arranged very carefully and neatly in, mainly two different ways - in periods, classical, romantic and contemporary and by composer. I found this organization very helpful and convenient but what struck me was that when the resources were listed by period, they had always seemed to …

…part transcribed for other, similar instruments. When did composers start writing for ensembles in a manner that we now call chamber music? What we claim today as being chamber music is the post 1750 chamber music that I described before, it came to being around 1750! Did the String Quartet simply appear out of no-where or are there ancestors of it? No, the string quartet did not appear out of no where, it evolved from the viol.