e used two gravicembali, four
viols, two trombones, two straight flutes, one cornet, one traverso and
two lutes, and in a motet composed in 1569 he had eight viols, eight
trombones, eight flutes, an instrument of the spinet family and a large
lute, together with voices. To delve backward from this point is not so
easy as it looks, yet however far back we may choose to go we cannot
fail to find evidences that assemblies of instruments were employed,
sometimes to accompany voices and again to play independently.

The antiquity of music at banquets, for example, is attested by sayings
as old as Solomon, by bitter comments of Plato, by the account of
Xenophon and by passages in the comedies of Aristophanes. The
instrumental music at banquets in Plato's time was that of Greek girl
flute players and harpers. Early in the Middle Ages the banquet music
consisted of any collection of instruments that chanced to be at hand.
In an ancient manuscript in the National Library of Paris there is a
picture of Heinrich of Meissen, the minnesinger (born 1260), conducting
a choir of singers and instrumental performers. The instruments are
viols and wooden wind instruments of the schalmei family. A bas relief
in the church of St. Gregory at Boscherville in Normandy shows an
orchestra of several players. This relief is of the twelfth century. It
presents first on the left a king who plays a three-stringed gamba,
which he holds between his knees, like a violoncello. A woman performer
handles an organistrum, a sort of large hurdy-gurdy, sometimes (as
apparently in this case) requiring two players, one for the crank and
another for the stops. Then comes a man with a pandean pipe, next
another with a semicircular harp and then one with a portable organ.
Next comes a performer on a round-bodied fiddle (the usual form of the
instrument at that time). Next to him is a harper, using a plectrum, and
at the right end of the group is a pair of players, man and woman,
performing on a glockenspiel. This orchestra was probably playing for
dancing, as no singers are in sight.

In a fifteenth century breviary reposing in the library of Brussels
there is a representation of a similar orchestra, and this brings us
nearer to the era of Poliziano's "Orfeo." The instruments are harp,
lute, dulcimer, hurdy-gurdy, double flute, pommer (an ancient oboe
form), bag-pipe, trombone, portable organ, triangle and a straight
flute with its accompanying little tambour. On