The term ‘chamber music’ is normally understood today as referring to music for two or more instruments with a single player to each part. Anyone invited to a concert of chamber music might expect to hear works for string quartet, wind ensemble, violin and piano and so on. If the programme turned out to consist entirely, or even largely, of vocal pieces the modern concert-goer might well feel let down in his or her expectations.

This would not have been the case in Handel's lifetime. Chamber music (musica da camera) would then have been understood as including those genres, vocal as well as instrumental, which were not encompassed by church music (musica da chiesa) or theatre music (musica da teatro). The identification of ‘chamber music’ with works for small instrumental ensembles (or with the ensembles themselves) is the product of a later age, when the string quartet and allied genres (as well as the ensembles that performed them) assumed a leading role in domestic music-making and, to a considerable extent, in public concert-giving. One result of this has been that the sonatas and other instrumental works of Handel and his contemporaries have in modern times been not only heard, but also studied and discussed, separately from the vocal genres with which in the eighteenth century they would have shared a platform – and this despite the fact that the two principal vocal genres are frequently referred to specifically as the chamber cantata and the chamber duet. The present chapter will focus on some of the structural and textural features that the instrumental and vocal chamber works of Handel have in common.