that of the fifteenth century. But this is a point about
which we cannot be too sure.

The decision must be sought in the general state of music at the time.
The learned masters cultivated only _a capella_ choral music, and the
unlearned imitated them. There was no systematic study of instrumental
composition. Even the organ had as yet acquired no independent office,
but simply supported voices by doubling their notes. It seems unlikely,
then, that the pipe in "Orfeo" could have had a real part. What it
probably did was to repeat as a sort of ritornello the clearly marked
refrain of the song. This would have been thoroughly in keeping with the
growing tendency of the frottola to use refrains and advance toward
strophical form.

The lyre, with which Baccio Ugolino as Orfeo accompanied himself, may
have been a cithara, but the probabilities are that it was not. As late
as the time of Praetorius's great work (Syntagma Musicum) the word "lyra"
was used to designate certain instruments of close relationship to the
viol family. Praetorius tells us that there were two kinds of Italian
lyres. The large lyre, called _lirone perfetto_, or arce violyra, was in
structure like the bass of the viola da gamba, but that the body and the
neck on account of the numerous strings were somewhat wider. Some had
twelve, some fourteen and some even sixteen strings, so that madrigals
and compositions both chromatic and diatonic could be performed and a
fine harmony produced. The small lyre was like the tenor viola di
braccio and was called the lyra di braccio. It had seven strings, two
of them outside the finger board and the other five over it. Upon this
instrument also certain harmonized compositions could be played. The
pictures of these two lyres show that they looked much like viols and
were played with bows.[27] An eighth century manuscript shows an
instrument with a body like a mandolin, a neck without frets and a small
bow. This instrument is entitled "lyra" in the manuscript. If now we
come down to the period when the modern opera was taking form we learn
that Galilei sang his own "Ugolino" monody and accompanied himself on
the viola. Various pictures show us that small instruments of the bowed
varieties were used by the minnesingers, and again by jongleurs in the
fifteenth century. Early Italian painters put such instruments into the
hands of angels and carvers left them for us to see, as in the cathedral
of Amiens. In fact there is