Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

But a startling number of pieces—symphonies, sonatas, madrigals, sonnets, even ambitious operas—were composed to the highest standards of professional musicianship.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 9, 2026

And her works go about answering them studiously but sensuously — with earnestness, wit, whimsy, self-awareness and music that ranges freely among, for a start, Baroque madrigals, power ballads and barbed modernism.

From New York Times • Feb. 20, 2023

The Middle Ages and Renaissance produced a body of “pestilential music”:motets, madrigals and other compositions responding to the horrific plagues of those times.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 20, 2020

It opened with a reworking of “Incenerite spoglie,” from Monteverdi’s sixth book of madrigals, set to an intense poem of grief for a dead lover.

From Washington Post • Apr. 7, 2019

Nor was it just in his madrigals that Monteverdi started shifting chords around for the sheer surprise and delight of it.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall