User:ElizabethBrownstone/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Chamber music

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
This article was assigned by Dr. Brand since it is relevant to our course of study this semester: chamber music.

Evaluate the article
Regarding the lead, it is long but seems well-organized.

Specifically evaluating the "Chamber music and society in the 19th century" section of the article, I noticed a few things.

First, a couple of wording choices stuck out to me as feeling awkward and not the best that could be used to describe the situations they intended to depict. Specifically the phrase "... a schism grew among romantic musicians over the direction of music" felt odd to me. Technically speaking, schisms don't grow; they fracture and break up something whole, but other things grow that lead to schism.

I also question the need to include the topic of the piano's increase in popularity, and pose that as something vying for popularity against chamber music. Yes, Chopin and Liszt did write solo works for piano, but piano was also incorporated into chamber music the same way the clavecin and harpsichord had been. It's not as if the piano was exclusively used for solo performance. The two paragraphs that discuss this raise it as an interesting fact about the history of chamber music (that it competed for the attention of audiences and composers), but it seems like something to include in articles about those composers or performers of the time, or even pages on specific types of chamber ensembles, rather than in an article like this that is already so long. Perhaps that's just my personal preference, though.