Chamber music
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Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part. However, by convention, it usually does not include solo instrument performances.
Frederick the Great plays flute in his summer palace Sanssouci, with Franz Benda playing violin, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach accompanying on keyboard, and unidentified string players; painting by Adolph Menzel (1850–52)
Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen play a piece on viols in this fanciful woodcut from 1516.
Baroque musicians playing a trio sonata, 18th-century anonymous painting
Copy of a pianoforte from 1805
Western concert flute
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The Western concert flute is a family of transverse (side-blown) woodwind instruments made of metal or wood. It is the most common variant of the flute. A musician who plays the flute is called a “flautist” in British English, and a “flutist” in American English.
A modern copy of an 18th-century French traverso, by flute-maker Boaz Berney
Various Baroque Flutes and Recorders in the Berlin Museum of Musical Instruments
An early keyed H.F. Meyer all-wood construction flute in case
Carlo Tommaso Giorgi and his Giorgi flute. The flute was end-blown.