Songs in classical music

thumb|upright=1.5|The Lute Player (Caravaggio)|The Lute Player () by Caravaggio. The lutenist reads madrigal music by the composer [[Jacques Arcadelt. (Hermitage, Saint Petersburg)]]

A (, ; , ) is generally any lyric-driven French song. The term is most commonly used in English to refer either to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval and Renaissance music or to a specific style of French pop music which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The genre had origins in the monophonic songs of troubadours and trouvères, though the only polyphonic precedents were 16 works by Adam de la Halle and one by Jehan de Lescurel. Not until the ars nova composer Guillaume de Machaut did any composer write a significant number of polyphonic chansons.

right|thumb|Franz Schubert's early masterpiece [[Gretchen am Spinnrade, which he wrote at age 17 to verse by Goethe, is one of the earlier of his lieder that is widely performed today.]] In the Western classical music tradition, '''''' ( , ; , ; ) is a term for setting poetry to music. The term is used for any kind of song in German, but among English speakers, is often used interchangeably with "art song" to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages as well. The poems that have been made into lieder often center on pastoral themes or themes of romantic love.

Literally 'song' in Italian, a canzone (; : canzoni; cognate with English to chant) is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal. Sometimes a composition which is simple and songlike is designated as a canzone, especially if it is by a non-Italian; a good example is the aria "Voi che sapete" from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

The canzona, also known as the canzon or canzone, is an Italian musical form derived from the Franco-Flemish and Parisian chansons.

A cantiga (cantica, cantar) is a medieval monophonic song, characteristic of the Galician-Portuguese lyric. Over 400 extant cantigas come from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, narrative songs about miracles or hymns in praise of the Holy Virgin. There are near 1700 secular cantigas but music has only survived for a very few: six cantigas de amigo by Martín Codax and seven cantigas de amor by Denis of Portugal.

A mélodie () is a form of French art song, arising in the mid-19th century. It is comparable to the German Lied. A chanson, by contrast, is a folk or popular French song.