Artistic Philosophy

The artists of the Chamber Music Collective share a vision of sociable, experimental, and intelligent musicianship. Its rotating cast of world-leading experts in the history and performance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Euro-American music take their inspiration from the intrepid hands-on approach and countercultural ethos that persists within the American Early Music movement. The collaborative ideal of learning and performance cultivated by the Collective follows from a simple but disruptive fact: the valued repertories that musicians and the general public now know as classical – a collection of authoritative, unalterable, and at times untouchable works – were anything but classical in their own time. So how can our encounters with historical technologies productively unsettle our ideas about this music, no matter which instruments we choose to perform on? How can a deeper understanding of and sympathy with historical performance techniques help to remake this music in today's music scenes? How can experimenting with once vibrant practices such as improvisation build new relationships with old repertories? And how can we create more diverse programming styles that resituate well-known works amid newly illuminating musical environments? Above all, the Chamber Music Collective seeks a creative reckoning with the musical past in order to transform the musical present.