Make your dinner music a supporting player, not a star at your dinner party

Dinner music is one of your best tools for creating a soothing, pampering atmosphere for your guests.

Choosing your dinner music is a job you can do well in advance. If you have an iPod with iPod speakers like the Bose SoundDock 10, you can just create your dinner music playlist and the job is done.

Or if you have a CD player you can stack, you can also minimize this chore. Just load the player and hit the play button at the right time. Then you can forget about it until all the discs have played.

If you have enough discs, you can probably even re-play them without any problems.

In other words, let the music be the background and let your guests be the stars!

Dinner party music shouldn't bother your guests!
I got a bit of an education on this point recently when a dinner guest asked (very politely) if I could change the jazz I had on. She said that she found the unresolved tension of the jazz chords distracting. When I listened for a few minutes, I realized she had a great point. I may love the music, but it was drawing attention to itself. I was wrong to assume that it worked well at a dinner party.

The moral of the story is that the music is a supporting player, not a star at your dinner party.

Soft classical instrumental music is always a good choice. If you choose music with singing, be careful to keep it quiet enough that people aren’t trying to listen to the words instead of to each other.

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