The term is used in music to refer generally to a work evocative of pastoral or rural life such as Edward MacDowell's Forest Idylls, and more specifically to a kind of French courtly entertainment (divertissement) of the baroque era where a pastoral poem was set to music, accompanied by ballet and singing.
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Examples of the latter are Lully's L'Idylle sur la Paix set to a text by Racine and Desmarets' Idylle sur la naissance du duc de Bourgogne set to a text by Antoinette Deshoulières.
The fame of this work has overshadowed his surviving orchestral works, which include Overture to a Comedy and the Delius-like A Berkshire Idyll.
Ivor Indyk has suggested that the Jindyworobaks were looking for a kind of pastoral poetry, harking back to an Arcadian idyll which was removed from the early pioneer period, back to the pre-colonisation era.
From the first of these collections, composer Charles Villiers Stanford selected the six poems of his song-cycle 'An Irish Idyll' (publ. 1901), dedicated to baritone Harry Plunket Greene, which includes one of Stanford's best-known songs, 'The Fairy Lough'.
The sonnet is dedicated to the Prešeren's home village of Vrba, expressing a sense of general melancholy over the lost idyll of the rural environment.
The painting is one of those satirised in Florence Claxton's watercolour The Choice of Paris - an idyll (1860).
Conveniently close to the geographical centre of England, the village was found to be far from the a chocolate box idyll: there was no village green, and its three public houses had closed.