Bassoon
The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family that plays music written in the bass and tenor clefs, the treble. Appearing in its modern form in the 19th century, the bassoon figures prominently in orchestral, concert band, chamber music literature, it is known for its distinctive tone colour, wide range, variety of character, agility. One who plays the bassoon is called a bassoonist; the word bassoon comes from Italian bassone. However, the Italian name for the same instrument is fagotto, in Spanish and Romanian it is fagot, in German fagott. Fagot is an Old French word meaning a bundle of sticks; the dulcian came to be known as fagotto in Italy. However, the usual etymology that equates fagotto with "bundle of sticks" is somewhat misleading, as the latter term did not come into general use until later; however an early English variation, "faget," was used as early as 1450 to refer to firewood, 100 years before the earliest recorded use of the dulcian. Further citation is needed to prove the lack of relation between the meaning "bundle of sticks" and "fagotto" or variants.
Some think it may resemble the Roman Fasces, a standard of bound sticks with an ax. A further discrepancy lies in the fact that the dulcian was carved out of a single block of wood—in other words, a single "stick" and not a bundle. B♭1–C5 The range of the bassoon begins at B♭1 and extends upward over three octaves to the G above the treble staff. Higher notes are possible but difficult to produce, called for: orchestral and concert band parts go higher than C5 or D5. Stravinsky's famously difficult opening solo in The Rite of Spring only ascends to D5. A1 is possible with a special extension to the instrument—see "Extended techniques" below; the bassoon is non-transposing. The bassoon disassembles into six main pieces, including the reed; the bell, extending upward. Bassoons are double reed instruments like the oboe; the bore of the bassoon is conical, like that of the oboe and the saxophone, the two adjoining bores of the boot joint are connected at the bottom of the instrument with a U-shaped metal connector.
Both bore and tone holes are precision-machined, each instrument is finished by hand for proper tuning. The walls of the bassoon are thicker at various points along the bore; this ensures coverage by the fingers of the average adult hand. Playing is facilitated by closing the distance between the spaced holes with a complex system of key work, which extends throughout nearly the entire length of the instrument; the overall height of the bassoon stretches to 1.34 m tall, but the total sounding length is 2.54 m considering that the tube is doubled back on itself. There are short-reach bassoons made for the benefit of young or petite players. A modern beginner's bassoon is made of maple, with medium-hardness types such as sycamore maple and sugar maple preferred. Less-expensive models are made of materials such as polypropylene and ebonite for student and outdoor use; the art of reed-making has been practiced for several hundred years, some of the earliest known reeds having been made for the dulcian, a predecessor of the bassoon.
Current methods of reed-making consist of a set of basic methods. Advanced players goes as far as making their own reeds to match their individual playing style. With regards to commercially made reeds, many companies and individuals offer pre-made reeds for sale, but players find that such reeds still require adjustments to suit their particular playing style. Modern bassoon reeds, made of Arundo donax cane, are made by the players themselves, although beginner bassoonists tend to buy their reeds from professional reed makers or use reeds made by their teachers. Reeds begin with a length of tube cane, split into three or four pieces using a tool called a cane splitter; the cane is trimmed and gouged to the desired thickness, leaving the bark attached. After soaking, the gouged cane is cut to the proper shape and milled to the desired thickness, or profiled, by removing material from the bark side; this can be done by hand with a file. After the profiled cane has soaked once again it is folded over in the middle.
Prior to soaking, the reed maker will have scored the bark with parallel lines with a knife. On the bark portion, the reed maker binds on one, two, or three coils or loops of brass wire to aid in the final forming process; the exact placement of these loops can vary somewhat depending on the reed maker. The bound reed blank is wrapped with thick cotton or linen thread to protect it, a conical steel mandrel is inserted in between the blades. Using a special pair o
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library that serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States; the Library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D. C.. The Library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol; the Library of Congress has claimed to be the largest library in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 450 languages."The Library of Congress moved to Washington in 1800 after sitting for 11 years in the temporary national capitals in New York City and Philadelphia. The small Congressional Library was housed in the United States Capitol for most of the 19th century until the early 1890s. Most of the original collection had been destroyed by the British in 1814 during the War of 1812, the library sought to restore its collection in 1815.
They bought Thomas Jefferson's entire personal collection of 6,487 books. After a period of slow growth, another fire struck the Library in its Capitol chambers in 1851, again destroying a large amount of the collection, including many of Jefferson's books. After the American Civil War, the Library of Congress grew in both size and importance, which sparked a campaign to purchase replacement copies for volumes, burned; the Library received the right of transference of all copyrighted works to deposit two copies of books, maps and diagrams printed in the United States. It began to build its collections, its development culminated between 1888 and 1894 with the construction of a separate, extensive library building across the street from the Capitol; the Library's primary mission is to research inquiries made by members of Congress, carried out through the Congressional Research Service. The Library is open to the public, although only high-ranking government officials and Library employees may check out books and materials.
James Madison is credited with the idea of creating a congressional library, first making such a proposition in 1783. The Library of Congress was subsequently established April 24, 1800 when President John Adams signed an act of Congress providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. Part of the legislation appropriated $5,000 "for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress... and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them." Books were ordered from London, the collection consisted of 740 books and three maps which were housed in the new United States Capitol. President Thomas Jefferson played an important role in establishing the structure of the Library of Congress. On January 26, 1802, he signed a bill that allowed the president to appoint the Librarian of Congress and establishing a Joint Committee on the Library to regulate and oversee it; the new law extended borrowing privileges to the President and Vice President.
The invading British army burned Washington in August 1814 during the War of 1812 and destroyed the Library of Congress and its collection of 3,000 volumes. These volumes had been left in the Senate wing of the Capitol. One of the few congressional volumes to survive was a government account book of receipts and expenditures for 1810, it was taken as a souvenir by British Admiral George Cockburn, whose family returned it to the United States government in 1940. Within a month, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his personal library as a replacement. Congress accepted his offer in January 1815; some members of the House of Representatives opposed the outright purchase, including New Hampshire Representative Daniel Webster who wanted to return "all books of an atheistical and immoral tendency." Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating a wide variety of books in several languages and on subjects such as philosophy, law, architecture, natural sciences, studies of classical Greece and Rome, modern inventions, hot air balloons, submarines, fossils and meteorology.
He had collected books on topics not viewed as part of a legislative library, such as cookbooks. However, he believed, he remarked: I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection. Jefferson's collection was unique in that it was the working collection of a scholar, not a gentleman's collection for display. With the addition of his collection, the Library of Congress was transformed from a specialist's library to a more general one, his original collection was organized into a scheme based on Francis Bacon's organization of knowledge. He grouped his books into Memory and Imagination, which broke down into 44 more subdivisions; the Library followed Jefferson's organization scheme until the late 19th century, when librarian Herbert Putnam began work on a more flexible Library of Congress Classification structure that now applies to more than 138 million items. In 1851, a fire destroyed two thirds of the Jefferson collection, with only 2,000 books remaining.
By 2008, the Librarians of Congress had found replacements for all but 300 of the works that were in Jefferson's original collection. On December 22, 1851 the largest fire in the Library's history destroyed 35,000 books, about two–thi
Harvard Shaker Village Historic District
Harvard Shaker Village Historic District is a historic former Shaker community located on Shaker Road, South Shaker Road, Maple Lane in Harvard, Massachusetts. It was the second oldest in the United States. Harvard's Shaker community began with dissenters from the local state-funded church, who left the state church and founded "Square House" in 1769 and in 1781-1782 affiliated themselves with Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker denomination, when she visited the community; the Harvard Shakers "split the community into four “families”, East and Church --only the latter two remain today."By the early twentieth century membership had dwindled to a handful from a peak of 200 in the 1850s, so in 1917 the community closed and the buildings were sold. That year preservationist Clara Endicott Sears purchased the 1794 Shaker office building and moved to the nearby Fruitlands Museum, it is the only Harvard Shaker building open to the public, it is the first Shaker museum established in the United States.
The remaining Shaker buildings are now private residences and much of the surrounding land remains undeveloped through a conservation easement. The historic district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Music was an important part of Shaker life at Harvard. In the 1780s, several songs were attributed to their spiritual leaders, "Mother Ann's Song" and "Father James's Song." One of the best known early Shaker hymns, "The Humble Heart," came from Harvard, with words by Eunice Wyeth and music by Thomas Hammond. National Register of Historic Places listings in Worcester County, Massachusetts Media related to Harvard Shaker Village, Massachusetts at Wikimedia Commons National Park Service, Places Where Women Made History
Piano
The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700, in which the strings are struck by hammers. It is played using a keyboard, a row of keys that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings; the word piano is a shortened form of pianoforte, the Italian term for the early 1700s versions of the instrument, which in turn derives from gravicembalo col piano e forte and fortepiano. The Italian musical terms piano and forte indicate "soft" and "loud" in this context referring to the variations in volume produced in response to a pianist's touch or pressure on the keys: the greater the velocity of a key press, the greater the force of the hammer hitting the strings, the louder the sound of the note produced and the stronger the attack; the name was created as a contrast to harpsichord, a musical instrument that doesn't allow variation in volume. The first fortepianos in the 1700s had smaller dynamic range.
An acoustic piano has a protective wooden case surrounding the soundboard and metal strings, which are strung under great tension on a heavy metal frame. Pressing one or more keys on the piano's keyboard causes a padded hammer to strike the strings; the hammer rebounds from the strings, the strings continue to vibrate at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that amplifies by more efficiently coupling the acoustic energy to the air; when the key is released, a damper stops the strings' vibration, ending the sound. Notes can be sustained when the keys are released by the fingers and thumbs, by the use of pedals at the base of the instrument; the sustain pedal enables pianists to play musical passages that would otherwise be impossible, such as sounding a 10-note chord in the lower register and while this chord is being continued with the sustain pedal, shifting both hands to the treble range to play a melody and arpeggios over the top of this sustained chord.
Unlike the pipe organ and harpsichord, two major keyboard instruments used before the piano, the piano allows gradations of volume and tone according to how forcefully a performer presses or strikes the keys. Most modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, 52 white keys for the notes of the C major scale and 36 shorter black keys, which are raised above the white keys, set further back on the keyboard; this means that the piano can play 88 different pitches, going from the deepest bass range to the highest treble. The black keys are for the "accidentals". More some pianos have additional keys. Most notes have three strings, except for the bass; the strings are sounded when keys are pressed or struck, silenced by dampers when the hands are lifted from the keyboard. Although an acoustic piano has strings, it is classified as a percussion instrument rather than as a stringed instrument, because the strings are struck rather than plucked. There are two main types of piano: the upright piano.
The grand piano is used for Classical solos, chamber music, art song, it is used in jazz and pop concerts. The upright piano, more compact, is the most popular type, as it is a better size for use in private homes for domestic music-making and practice. During the 1800s, influenced by the musical trends of the Romantic music era, innovations such as the cast iron frame and aliquot stringing gave grand pianos a more powerful sound, with a longer sustain and richer tone. In the nineteenth century, a family's piano played the same role that a radio or phonograph played in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, music publishers produced many musical works in arrangements for piano, so that music lovers could play and hear the popular pieces of the day in their home; the piano is employed in classical, jazz and popular music for solo and ensemble performances and for composing and rehearsals. Although the piano is heavy and thus not portable and is expensive, its musical versatility, the large number of musicians and amateurs trained in playing it, its wide availability in performance venues and rehearsal spaces have made it one of the Western world's most familiar musical instruments.
With technological advances, amplified electric pianos, electronic pianos, digital pianos have been developed. The electric piano became a popular instrument in the 1960s and 1970s genres of jazz fusion, funk music and rock music; the piano was founded on earlier technological innovations in keyboard instruments. Pipe organs have been used since Antiquity, as such, the development of pipe organs enabled instrument builders to learn about creating keyboard mechanisms for sounding pitches; the first string instruments with struck strings were the hammered dul
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge aka Liz Coolidge, born Elizabeth Penn Sprague, was an American pianist and patron of music of chamber music. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge's father was a wealthy wholesale dealer in Chicago, she was musically studied piano as well as composition. She married the physician Frederic Shurtleff Coolidge who died from syphilis contracted from a patient during surgery, leaving her with their only child Albert. Soon after, her parents died as well. Coolidge's cousin was the founder of Bank Street College of Education. Coolidge provided Mitchell with funds for the founding of the school in 1916, she inherited a considerable amount of money from her parents and decided to spend it on promotion of chamber music, a mission she continued to carry out until her death at the age of 89 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Due to her husband's profession, she gave financial support to medical institutions. Coolidge's financial resources were not unlimited but through force of personality and conviction she managed to raise the status of chamber music in the United States, where the major interest of composers had been in orchestral music, from curiosity to a seminal field of composition.
Her devotion to music and generosity to musicians were spurred by her own experience as a performing musician: she appeared as a pianist up to her 80s, accompanying world-renowned instrumentalists. Coolidge established the Berkshire String Quartet in 1916 and started the Berkshire Music Festival at South Mountain, Massachusetts, two years later. Out of this grew the Berkshire Symphonic Festival at Tanglewood, which she supported, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1951. Elizabeth's only son, graduated from the Harvard University and was a chemical physicist, political activist, civil libertarian. In 1932, Coolidge established the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for "eminent services to chamber music." The medals were awarded by the Library of Congress. But, in 1949 — after objections by U. S. Congressmen over the appropriateness of a government body awarding prizes in fine arts and literature to individuals who might harbor dissident views towards the U. S. — the Library of Congress discontinued awarding medals of any kind, including the Bollingen Prize, the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for "eminent services to chamber music, three prizes endowed by Lessing Rosenwald in connection with an annual national exhibition of prints.
Earlier Coolidge Prizes and Commissions 1918 – Tadeusz Iarecki 1919 – Ernest Bloch: Chamber Music Prize for the Berkshire Festival 1920 – Gian Francesco Malipiero 1921 – Harry Waldo Warner 1922 – Leo Weiner: Chamber Music Prize for the Berkshire Festival 1923 – Commissions for the Berkshire Festival:Eugene Goosens Rebecca Clarke1936 – Jerzy Fitelberg: String Quartet no. 4Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medals for Eminent Services to Chamber Music Louis Gruenberg, Four Diversions, string quartet, composed in 1930 Frank Bridge Abbey Simon Hugo Kortschak Kenneth Schermerhorn Benjamin Britten Alexander Tansman Randall Thompson Roy Harris, Sonata for Violin and Piano Quincy Porter Alexander Schneider Erich Itor Kahn Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for Conductors James Allen Dixon Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for Best Performance of Contemporary Music The Zagreb SoloistsElizabeth Sprague Coolidge Medal for the Best String Quartet in Europe The Netherlands String Quartet In 1945 she commissioned the Paganini Quartet, led by Henri Temianka.
The Sprague Memorial Hall at Yale University was financed by Coolidge. Her most innovative and costly endeavor, was her partnership with the Library of Congress, resulting in the construction of the 500-seat Coolidge Auditorium intended for chamber music, in 1924; this was accompanied by the establishment of the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to organize concerts in that auditorium and to commission new chamber music from both European and American composers, as it continues to do today. Coolidge had a reputation for promoting "difficult" modern music, but she never aimed at such a reputation and explained her preferences in music as follows: "My plea for modern music is not that we should like it, nor that we should understand it, but that we should exhibit it as a significant human document." Though American herself, she had no national preferences, in fact most of her commissions went to European composers. She didn't have any urge to promote women composers, either, she sponsored the 1927 tour of the United States of composer Ottorino Respighi and his wife, the soprano Elsa.
The conclusion of the tour was a program held at the Library of Congress chamber music hall that she had funded, at that occasion Respighi promised to dedicate his next musical composition to Mrs. Coolidge; that composition turned out to be the Trittico Botticelliano, inspired by three Botticelli paintings on display at the Uffizi museum in Florence, Italy. The first performance of the work was at a concert in Vienna at the end of that same year, with the Respighis in attendance; the most lasting memorial to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge's patronage of music are the compositions which she commissioned from many leading composers of the early 20th century. Among the best-known of those compositions are the following: Samuel Barber: Hermit Songs, Op. 29 Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 5 Benjamin Britten: String Quartet No. 1 Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: String Quartet No. 1, Op. 58 Aaron Copland: Appalachian
Isamu Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold. In 1947, Noguchi began a collaboration with the Herman Miller company, when he joined with George Nelson, Paul László and Charles Eames to produce a catalog containing what is considered to be the most influential body of modern furniture produced, including the iconic Noguchi table which remains in production today, his work lives on at the Noguchi Museum in New York City. Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, the illegitimate son of Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet, acclaimed in the United States, Léonie Gilmour, an American writer who edited much of Noguchi's work. Yone had ended his relationship with Gilmour earlier that year and planned to marry The Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes.
After proposing to Armes, Yone left for Japan in late August, settling in Tokyo and awaiting her arrival. In 1906, Yone invited Léonie to come to Tokyo with their son, she at first refused, but growing anti-Japanese sentiment following the Russo-Japanese War convinced her to take up Yone's offer. The two departed from San Francisco in March 1907. Upon arrival, their son was given the name Isamu. However, Yone had married a Japanese woman by the time they arrived, was absent from his son's childhood. After again separating from Yone, Léonie and Isamu moved several times throughout Japan. In 1912, while the two were living in Chigasaki, Isamu's half-sister, pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement Ailes Gilmour, was born to Léonie and an unknown father. Here, Léonie had a house built for the three of them, a project that she had the 8-year-old Isamu "oversee". Nurturing her son's artistic ability, she put him in charge of their garden and apprenticed him to a local carpenter. However, they moved once again in December 1917 to an English-speaking community in Yokohama.
In 1918, Noguchi was sent back to the U. S. for schooling in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. After graduation, he left with Dr. Edward Rumely to LaPorte, where he found boarding with a Swedenborgian pastor, Samuel Mack. Noguchi began attending La Porte High School, graduating in 1922. During this period of his life, he was known by the name "Sam Gilmour". After high school, Noguchi explained his desire to become an artist to Rumely. Best known as the creator of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Borglum was at the time working on the group called Wars of America for the city of Newark, New Jersey, a piece that includes forty-two figures and two equestrian sculptures; as one of Borglum's apprentices, Noguchi received little training as a sculptor. He did, pick up some skills in casting from Borglum's Italian assistants fashioning a bust of Abraham Lincoln. At summer's end, Borglum told Noguchi that he would never become a sculptor, prompting him to reconsider Rumely's prior suggestion, he traveled to New York City, reuniting with the Rumely family at their new residence, with Dr. Rumely's financial aid enrolled in February 1922 as a premedical student at Columbia University.
Soon after, he met the bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, who urged him to reconsider art, as well as the Japanese dancer Michio Itō, whose celebrity status helped Noguchi find acquaintances in the art world. Another influence was his mother, who in 1923 moved from Japan to California later to New York. In 1924, while still enrolled at Columbia, Noguchi followed his mother's advice to take night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School; the school's head, Onorio Ruotolo, was impressed by Noguchi's work. Only three months Noguchi held his first exhibit, a selection of plaster and terracotta works, he soon dropped out of Columbia University to pursue sculpture full-time, changing his name from Gilmour to Noguchi. After moving into his own studio, Noguchi found work through commissions for portrait busts, he won the Logan Medal of the Arts. During this time, he frequented avant garde shows at the galleries of such modernists as Alfred Stieglitz and J. B. Neuman, took a particular interest in a show of the works of Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brâncuși.
In late 1926, Noguchi applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship. In his letter of application, he proposed to study stone and wood cutting and to gain "a better understanding of the human figure" in Paris for a year spend another year traveling through Asia, exhibit his work, return to New York, he was awarded the grant despite being three years short of the age requirement. Noguchi arrived in Paris in April 1927 and soon afterward met the American author Robert McAlmon, who brought him to Constantin Brâncuși's studio for an introduction. Despite a language barrier between the two artists, Noguchi was taken in as Brâncuși's assistant for the next seven months. During this time, Noguchi gained his footing in stone sculpture, a medium with which he was unacquainted, though he would admit that one of Brâncuși's greatest teachings was to appreciate "the value of the moment". Meanwhile, Noguchi f
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble consisting of four string players – two violin players, a viola player and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group. The string quartet is one of the most prominent chamber ensembles in classical music, with most major composers, from the mid 18th century onwards, writing string quartets; the string quartet was developed into its current form by the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, with his works in the 1750s establishing the genre. Since Haydn's day the string quartet has been considered a prestigious form and represents one of the true tests of the composer's art. With four parts to play with, a composer working in anything like the classical key system has enough lines to fashion a full argument, but none to spare for padding; the related characters of the four instruments, while they cover in combination an ample compass of pitch, do not lend themselves to indulgence in purely colouristic effects. Thus, where the composer of symphonies commands the means for textural enrichment beyond the call of his harmonic discourse, where the concerto medium offers the further resource of personal characterization and drama in the individual-pitted-against-the-mass vein, the writer of string quartets must perforce concentrate on the bare bones of musical logic.
Thus, in many ways the string quartet is pre-eminently the dialectical form of instrumental music, the one most suited to the activity of logical disputation and philosophical enquiry. Quartet composition flourished in the Classical era, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert following Haydn in each writing a number of quartets. A slight slackening in the pace of quartet composition occurred in the 19th century, in part due to a movement away from classical forms by composers such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, it received a resurgence in the 20th Century with the Second Viennese School, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich and Elliott Carter producing regarded examples of the genre. In the 21st century it remains an refined musical form; the standard structure for a string quartet as established in the Classical era is four movements, with the first movement in Sonata form, Allegro, in the tonic key. Some quartets play together for many years in ensembles which may be named after the first violinist, a composer or a location.
Some have fanciful names such as the JACK Quartet. Well-known string quartets can be found in the list of string quartet ensembles; the early history of the string quartet is in many ways the history of Haydn's journey with the genre. Not that he composed the first quartet of all: before Haydn alighted on the genre there had been several spasmodic examples of divertimenti for two solo violins and cello by Viennese composers such as Georg Christoph Wagenseil and Ignaz Holzbauer. David Wyn Jones cites the widespread practice of playing works written for string orchestra, such as divertimenti and serenades, with just four players, one to a part, there being no separate contrabass part in string scoring before the 19th century. However, these composers showed no interest in exploring the development of the string quartet as a medium; the origins of the string quartet can be further traced back to the Baroque trio sonata, in which two solo instruments performed with a continuo section consisting of a bass instrument and keyboard.
A early example is a four-part sonata for string ensemble by Gregorio Allegri that might be considered an important prototype. By the early 18th century, composers were adding a third soloist, thus when Alessandro Scarlatti wrote a set of six works entitled "Sonata à Quattro per due Violini, Violetta, e Violoncello senza Cembalo", this was a natural evolution from the existing tradition. The string quartet in its now accepted form came about with Haydn. If the combination of two violins and cello was not unknown before Haydn, when it occurred in chamber music it was more through circumstance than conscious design; the composition of Haydn's earliest string quartets owed more to chance than artistic imperative. During the 1750s, when the young composer was still working as a teacher and violinist in Vienna, he would be invited to spend time at the nearby castle at Weinzierl of the music-loving Austrian nobleman Karl Joseph Weber, Edler von Fürnberg. There he would play chamber music in an ad hoc ensemble consisting of Fürnberg's steward, a priest and a local cellist, when the Baron asked for some new music for the group to play, Haydn's first string quartets were born.
It is not clear whether any of these works ended up in the two sets published in the mid-1760s and known as Haydn's Opp.1 and 2, but it seems reasonable to assume that they were at least similar in character. Haydn's early biographer Georg August Griesinger tells the story thus: The following purely
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