A piece of music written for singers with instruments playing behind them, made of several short parts one after another — some sung by one voice alone, some by a choir. Most famous cantatas are church music, written to be performed during a service; Bach wrote hundreds of them for Sunday worship. There are non-religious ones too (a wedding cantata, a coffee cantata), so "religious" is the usual case, not a rule. The word tells you the size and shape as much as the subject: a cantata is much shorter than an opera and has no acting, costumes or story on stage, and it is shorter and less grand than an oratorio. It is a specialist music word — you will meet it on concert programmes, CD covers and in music class, not in everyday talk.