Salon music

Salon music is a category of Western classical music cultivated in 19th-century Europe and intended primarily for performance in private domestic and social gatherings known as salons, rather than in public concert halls. Most often written for solo piano or for piano with one other instrument, the genre is broadly defined by short, self-contained pieces with lyrical melodies, clear tonal harmony, and immediately graspable forms. As a subcategory of Romantic music, it includes both lyrical character pieces such as nocturnes, romances and barcarolles and virtuosic showpieces such as operatic paraphrases, variations and fantasias.