The music at a dinner is not a soundtrack. It is a fourth element of the room, alongside the light, the smell, and the warmth. Most dinners get it slightly wrong in one of two directions: the music is not there at all and the room feels thin, or the music is loud enough to matter and the room becomes a bar. This is how to get it right.
Before they arrive: instrumental.
No lyrics. A little jazz, a little bossa, some piano, a string quartet if you are feeling it. Nothing that demands attention.
The goal is to give the room a body, not to tell your guests what to think. Think of it as the smell of the room you cannot smell.
When they arrive: same.
Do not change it yet. The first ten minutes, while coats come off and drinks are poured, is the same music you had on.
Change happens after the meal starts, if it happens at all.
During dinner: quieter.
Dinner is a conversation. The music, if you leave it on, should sit under the conversation the way salt sits under a dish: you do not notice it, but if it were gone, the food would taste flat.
Turn it down ten decibels when you sit. If you have to turn it down again, turn it down.
After dinner: depends on the room.
If the evening is ending, put on something warmer. A little folk, a little voice, slower.
If the evening is still happening, put on something with a pulse. Mid-tempo, still not a dance floor. You are not trying to create a dance floor. You are trying to keep the kitchen warm.
What to avoid.
Lyrics you love, sung by someone whose voice you love, because you will start singing along and no one else will.
The playlist someone else made that you have not listened to. Anything with an advertisement break, so: no free streaming, please, pay the four dollars.
One playlist. Two hours long.
That is all you need. Make it once. Use it every dinner. It becomes yours.
Your guests will start to recognize it. It becomes part of what an evening at your house is.
Music at a dinner is not a topic of conversation. It is the room’s fourth element, and it does its best work when no one comments on it.