 Good afternoon, everybody, from the loud to the very quiet chamber music. Yes, pleasure to be talking to you today. I'm going to just start with a little introduction to myself and how I got into this topic. Basically, I've been gradually working my way there through the late 18th century into the early 19th century. It may seem like a rather short journey to you from Haydn, which was my topic of my PhD thesis. Through to a book on Beethoven's middle period string quartets dealing with a canonic composer and canonic genres, and in the first part of that book I had an introductory chapter and that chapter basically became the subject of the present research, which is looking at everything else other than Beethoven, but during his same time period and in his same location Vienna, which was a hotbed of musical production and publishing and performance in the late 18th and early 19th century. It's an incredibly exciting time in music history because for the first time music started to be more publicly performed. It was publicly performed in the church and in court settings where semi-publicly performed, where quite large gatherings could obviously amass, but for the first time concert life starts and music gets spread on a wider screen, if you like. Now during this time in Vienna there were a variety of other composers busy working away, but today we know virtually nothing about them and that was to my mind a great pity. Why do we know virtually nothing about them? Well it has to do obviously with the quality of their work and with the aesthetics of the time, but when I went back and started editing some of this music I found that that wasn't necessarily the most important factor that was preventing their music from being known today. One of the factors was that it wasn't so common in those days to publish because publication of music in Vienna was quite slow to get going as opposed to the Protestant North. And so it's a time when chamber music becomes the first music to be most widely unpublished and distributed, but certain composers hadn't cottoned on to that idea and so some of this music remained unpublished even though it was very good. So I started to edit some of this music myself and realised that it was a great pity that it wasn't more widely known today. The other reason why this music isn't so well known, this is a letter by Beethoven by the way and as you can see, even if you're German even if you have some background in reading this kind of handwriting you will still find it difficult. I've been with some colleagues at the Beethoven House still trying to figure out some of the words on this page a rather famous testament by Beethoven and so we get handwritten documents, we have diaries, we have so-called ephemera that are main lines of evidence for what went on in private sphere music making during the time. So it's sometimes quite difficult to get at the evidence, it sometimes involves a bit of sleuthing and detective work and some of the evidence is rather hard to uncover and even once you have quite difficult to decipher. On the other hand there are a wide variety of different lines of evidence that we can use to uncover what happened in the private sphere and one of my favourite is to look at iconography. I just talked very briefly about this picture by way of a case study of how I operate when I'm looking at chamber music in Beethoven's Vienna and trying not to focus on Beethoven. This particular picture has to do with Schubert. He's actually labelled here, he's the little guy with the mushroom head and the little spectacles sort of curly hair. So he's labelled. There's a variety of pictures that one looks at for evidence about the string quartet and other chamber music making at the time and typically I find that a lot of the emphasis in these pictures is in fact on the listeners. As you can see here some of them are actually labelled with their names and not the performer. We also notice a variety of visual tropes trotting through these pictures. Very often there are busts and other artefacts that suggest high art in connection with the string quartet in particular. So those tropes start to establish the privileged nature of chamber music making. And as I said, a focus on the listeners, often they're deeply, they've either got their eyes closed or as in the case, we don't really know about this man on your left, whether he's asleep, whether he's studying a score on his, people have suggested different things that maybe he's studying a score on his lap or maybe that's the fold of his trouser. But there always seems to be some sort of an emphasis on the listener and on the act of listening, so that's one of my avenues of research. Part of what's new about this research is that I do focus on audience reception quite a lot and on performance. I'm not so concerned with looking at the notes, partly because it's quite difficult to get those notes in the first place. I have to do lots of editing and fosicking around and transcribing, but gradually I am building up a repertoire of this music. But I'm trying to carve out a broadly cultural approach to the music, and that involves looking at various other different kinds of evidence than the notes on the page. So, for example, I have a section on publishing. These are... Oh, I'll come back to that one in a minute. We could talk about that. These are the chapters of my book, this one here. So, defining chamber music in the 19th century, celebrating Haydn, who was actually, as opposed to Beethoven, one of the main cultural gods in Vienna in the early 19th century, was also getting his name made for him and partly himself making his name. But he was not so well known and by those who did write about him, well, they thought that he was quite an avant-garde composer. So, we're looking at venues between chamber and theatre, the new venues that were carved out for this music. Chamber music in the Biedermeyer site, so how it factors into the coffee and culture of the salon. Coffee... sort of table culture. I'm interested in criticism and how social ideals were written into that criticism. And then I'm interested in what happened next, what happened after Beethoven disappeared from the scene and the impact that his music had in part then covering up all of that other music that's then become lost to today. Thank you very much.