Madrigal is a secular vocal composition for several voices, typically unaccompanied, that flourished in renaissance italy and elizabethan england.
The madrigal arose in 16th-century Italy as a setting of secular Italian poetry — sonnets, love lyrics, pastoral verse — for a small group of unaccompanied voices, usually three to six. Composers like Cipriano de Rore, Luca Marenzio, and Carlo Gesualdo developed an increasingly expressive style in which the music painted the meaning of individual words: rising lines for 'ascend', dissonance for 'pain', silence for 'death'. Gesualdo's chromatic experiments around 1611 went so far that the music sounded modern again only in the 20th century. The form crossed to England in the 1580s, where Thomas Morley, Thomas Weelkes, and John Wilbye created a distinctly English madrigal tradition published in collections like 'The Triumphs of Oriana' (1601). The madrigal was the chamber music of its day — sung by amateurs in private rooms — and still rewards small ensembles willing to sit down together and listen to themselves.