Music
The music performed at a madrigal dinner is usually mixed choral music from the medieval to renaissance periods. Both popular and sacred songs from the renaissance are common, although modern music with renaissance or biblical texts can often be heard. Most selections are in English, Italian, German, or French. Although the dinner takes its name from the madrigal genre of music, many other styles can be heard. Christmas carols are also featured.
Several selections performed at the presentation of the meal's courses are traditional to the madrigal dinner genre. These include The Wassail Song and the Boar's Head Carol. Although they may incorporate small phrases of Latin or French, the presentation songs are primarily sung in English. Each madrigal dinner has a complement of presentation music which is used every year.
Read more about this topic: Madrigal Dinner
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)