And while we're on the subject of chamber music, where better to turn than this weekend's Chamber Music Matters conference?

It's a two-day forum run by Enterprise Music Scotland – behind-the-scenes facilitators of chamber music activity across the country – and designed to gather Scottish chamber musicians and industry representatives under one roof for more-or-less the first time.

The opening keynote will be delivered by Tom Service, Glasgow born-and-raised and one of the UK's most active and respected classical music writers and broadcasters. He's a man with his heart in the right place, too; a hearty advocate of state music education, contemporary music and community music engagement – and, it seems, of chamber music provision.

For the benefit of those who can't attend the talk on Friday, Service gave me a quick low-down on his key points. And when I say quick, I mean quick; he's a famously keen talker and packs in his ideas thick and fast, but here, I hope, is the general gist of it.

"The speech is called Radical Rooms: Decreasing the scale, Increasing the Ambition, and Why We're All Chamber Musicians Now," he sets off over the phone.

"Basically, I think that chamber music embodies the kind of ideals – intimacy, dialogue, genuine listening – that the whole of music making aspires to. But maybe I should start by pointing out that the major revolutions in Western musical history have all happened on a chamber scale. Right back to the beginning of notation – putting one line up against another to turn plainchant into polyphony. That's an intimate encounter straight off."

He hurtles through a chronology of chamber-scale landmarks: the renaissance men of the Florentine Camerata; the blossoming of Italian madrigals out of sacred polyphony; Mozart's Haydn Quartets – "the point at which instrumental music really became conscious of itself"; Beethoven's string quartets, "far more conclusively radical than his symphonies"; Schoenberg's Second String Quartet and his Society for Private Musical Performance; Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat and the roots of Neo-Classicisism; right up to American minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, still to this day writing non-hierarchical music for small democratic groups.

So why is it that so many composers choose to make their biggest statements with the smallest forces? As discussed by cellist Su-a Lee above, orchestral musicians often seek out chamber music for the creative liberation it allows them. Likewise, Service believes the appeal for composers is an equivalent freedom of expression. "Operas and symphonies are big public forums. Sure, that might make them more superficially prestigious. But they are also more expensive and the risks are higher. Composers can be freer when they're writing music for their friends to play. They can be more artistically ambitious and, especially composers writing for self-run operations, can be free of institutional baggage." The prestige becomes not the public grandeur of scale but the private grandeur of unhindered creative voice.

As for the inclusive clause of his keynote title – Why We're All Chamber Musicians Now; Service says that has a lot to do with place. In previous centuries an easy definition of chamber music was, quite literally, music that could be played in a room – which translated to big rooms in wealthy homes. Nowadays it's as portable and flexible as any form of instrumental music making, classical or other. "We hear string quartets in pubs or night clubs or disused nuclear bunkers. But the most radical room is still in the home. That is where the real charmed circle of listening happens. In the 19th century most people got to know operas and symphonies through playing transcriptions of them for piano duet. Chamber music has an immediate impact because it's tangible. You can find a score, go home and have a bash at it yourself."

Service's modesty slightly contradicts his own argument here; he learned cello and piano at school but claims he was too shoddy at both to ever play much chamber music himself. Still, as an advocate his impact is inspiring. He's chairman of CoMA, for example – Contemporary Music for All, a London-based operation that promotes amateur involvement in contemporary music making. In an age of ever-pinched arts purses, it's investment in organisations such as CoMA and EMS that can help music-making feel a little more tangible to us all.

Service's first book, called Music is Alchemy, is published next month by Faber & Faber. It follows the likes of Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons, Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado, unpicking the mythical chemistry that happens (or doesn't) between conductors and their orchestras. "Funnily enough," says Service, "these great conductors are all after the same thing. They want their orchestras to play with the sensibility, flexibility, intimacy of a chamber group."

Chamber Music Matters is at the Royal Concert Hall on Friday and Saturday.