(Ger.: ‘table music’; Fr. musique de table).
A term used since the 16th century for music at feasts and banquets, both in noble and middle-class circles, and as a title for printed and manuscript music anthologies. Musical presentations at feasts were common in antiquity, and written and pictorial accounts of musical compositions and performances in conviviis et festis survive from the Middle Ages (see illustration). However, the expression ‘Musik zur Tafel’, ‘Tafelmusik’ or ‘musique de table’ (with related compounds) came into use only in the mid-16th century, when it delimited a genre equivalent in stature to sacred or chamber music. Appointment records and descriptions of duties in chapel archives from the second half of the century frequently refer to vocal and instrumental performance zur Taffel (‘at the table’).
Michael Praetorius (PraetoriusSM, iii, 130 [recte 110]) reported that vocal and instrumental music was performed at feasts as at intermezzos (‘Also und dergestalt kan man es mit anordnung einer guten Music vor grosser Herrn Taffel oder bey andern frölichen conventibus auch halten’). In 1617 Samuel Schein published his Banchetto musicale, and paraphrases of the expression ‘Tafelmusik’ soon became common, for example in Isaac Posch's Musicalische Tafelfreudt and Thomas Simpson's Taffel Consort erster Theil (both 1621). During the 17th century vocal works (often with continuo) and instrumental suites alike were published under the title ‘Tafelmusik’ or ‘Musique de table’. In J.V. Rathgeber’s collections (1733–46) instrumental works in several genres appear alongside songs and polyphonic vocal pieces; Telemann's three sets (1733, published as Musique de table) each consist of an overture and suite, a quartet, a concerto, a trio sonata, a solo sonata and a ‘conclusion’. In the second half of the 18th century Tafelmusik, which had always tended to be light and entertaining, approached the character of the Divertimento and was given such alternative titles as Musicalische Blumenlese, Musikalisches Magazin or Musikalischer Blumenkranz. The importance of the genre soon diminished and even the purpose met with disapproval. Zelter's Liedertafel, although based on nationalist political elements, partly restored the original function of Tafelmusik to the 19th century. Male-voice choral societies called Liedertafel continued the practice of singing and dining until the mid-20th century. (For further illustration see Nuremberg, fig.4.)
M. Ruhnke: Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der deutschen Hofmusikkollegien im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1963)
G. Hausswald: Die Orchesterserenade, Mw, xxxiv (1970)
E. Reimer: ‘Tafelmusik’ (1972), HMT
J. Ulsamer and K. Stahmer: Musikalisches Tafelkonfekt (Würzburg, 1973)
W. Littler: ‘Tafelmusik takes off’, Music Magazine, xii (1989), 14–17
H. Seifert: ‘Zu den Funktionen von Unterhaltungsmusik im 18. Jahrhundert’, Gesellschaftsgebundene instrumentale Unterhaltungsmusik des 18. Jahrhunderts: Eichstätt 1988, 33–45
HUBERT UNVERRICHT