This year's Ojai Festival in California chose not one curator for its programming lineup, but six. Administrators picked the Chicago-based sextet known as eighth blackbird to oversee the music. It will also perform at the festival.

What's striking is that eighth blackbird (yes, it uses lower-case letters) is a chamber-music ensemble. It says something about the ability of chamber musicians to think creatively that Ojai wanted their input for this year's festival. How often has an opera company or a symphony orchestra been asked to curate a festival?

While large musical ensembles, with their enormous overheads, are struggling to maintain their operations in light of the current economic constriction, the more nimble chamber musicians may weather this fiscal climate much more easily. After all, it's a difference between supporting three, four or at most nine musicians versus a hundred. But something else is in the air.

We live in an age of bombast, when the most piercing squeak, the loudest screech get noticed. Daily we are assaulted by the noise of information. Yet the conversational back-and-forth of chamber music allows us a kind of respite from the din. This isn't to say that chamber music isn't searching, piercing, intellectual. Just listen to Mozart's Quintet in G Minor, or Beethoven's late quartets, with their sometimes-harrowing intensity of feeling.

I've read some critics arguing that attending chamber-music concerts defeats the very notion of chamber music, which is to play it. Otherwise, why not simply put on a record and use it as background music? Well, our days are filled with background music. Live chamber music asks us to pay attention. I sometimes pass a ground-floor apartment near my home on certain nights and hear from its open windows an amateur quartet rehearsing a chamber work. I am envious at their dedication, their skill, the waves of personal music pouring out onto a Manhattan street. I pause for a few minutes of casual enlightenment, happier for having chanced upon the efforts of others to engage themselves and, by inadvertent extension, me, in a vibrant musical dialogue.

I don't play a string instrument. And my piano skills are, at best, rudimentary. So I seek out chamber concerts.  And I am not alone.

This summer, in fact, has dozens of chamber music festivals all over the country, from the Portland (Maine) Chamber Music Festival to the Seattle Chamber Music Festival and many more in the states in between. In Europe, chamber-music celebrations range from Norway's Risør Festival of Chamber Music, June 23-28, with Leiv Ove Andsnes as co-artistic director, to Britain's Lincoln & Lincolnshire International Chamber Music Festival in August. Chamber music is a part of every major classical music festival as well.

And why wouldn't it be?

Visitors to this site can also sample some stellar videos of chamber music performances now. Among them are an energetic and lyrical recital from the Lindsay String Quartet, recorded live at the Wigmore Hall, London that includes Haydn's "The Rider" quartet and  Elgar's Quartet in E minor Op.83; and the Fontenay Trio playing Mozart's Piano Trio in B flat and Brahms's Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello in C major.

Happy listening.

Pictures: eighth blackbird (great chamber music, ignore the spelling and the maths); Chamber Music in Cetnral Park, oil on canvas by Gerald Ruggiero.