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 …showed first 75 words of 1612 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1612 total…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.