relatively brief, simple vocal composition, usually a setting of a poetic text, often strophic, for accompanied solo voice . The song literature of Western music embodies two broad classifications— folk song and art song. Apart from the recently discovered cuneiform tablet containing a song from the Middle East of the 2d millennium B.C. , now thought to be the oldest notated music known, and apart from ancient Greek song (see Greek music ), the manuscripts of which are lost, the first outstanding examples of art song before the baroque period are those of the troubadours , trouvères , minnesingers , and meistersingers . The refined, lyrical air de cour of late 16th-century France, for one or more voices with lute accompaniment, provided the inspiration for the ayre composed by the early 17th-century English lutenists, among whom were John Dowland, Thomas Campion, and Thomas Morley. The Italians centered their principal attention upon the development of the opera . The principle of…