e not
conceived in the instrumental idiom and must have floated in an
exceedingly thin atmosphere when separated from text and the expressive
nuances of the human tone. But the music of the dance was centuries old
and it had in all eras been sung by instruments, as well as by voices.
The invasion of the realm of popular melody by crude imitations of the
polyphonic devices of the Netherlanders could not have crushed out the
melodic and rhythmic basis of dance music and this had fitted itself to
the utterance of instruments. We are therefore justified in believing
that if the accompaniment of the first chorus in the "Orfeo" was
superfluous and vague that of the final ballata must have been clearer
in character and better suited to the nature of the scene. The dance
following the ballata must have been effective. The instruments were
most probably lutes, viols, flute, oboe, and possibly bag-pipe,
hurdy-gurdy and little organ.

We have already inquired into the nature of the instrument which Baccio
Ugolino carried on the stage and with which after the manner of the
minstrels of his time he accompanied himself. It remains now only to ask
what was the pipe which the shepherd Aristaeus mentions in the first
scene. It was probably not a flageolet, though that instrument suggests
itself as particularly appropriate to the episode. But the good Dr.
Burney says that the flageolet was invented by the Sieur Juvigny, who
played it in the "Ballet Comique de la Royne," the first French pastoral
opera, in 1581. It could have been a recorder, the ancestor of the
flageolet, which was probably in use in the fourteenth and surely in the
fifteenth century. But more probably it was one of the older reed
instruments of the oboe family, the pommer or possibly a schalmei. The
schalmei is mentioned as far back as Sebastian Virdung's "Musica
getuscht und ausgezogen" (1511). Its ancestor was probably the
zamr-el-kebyr, an Oriental reed instrument. The schalmei was developed
into a whole family, enumerated by Praetorius in the work already
mentioned. The highest of these, the little schalmei, was seldom used,
but the "soprano schalmei is the primitive type of the modern oboe."[29]

[Footnote 29: See "A Note on Oboes," by Philip Hale. Programme
Books of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, season of 1905-06,
p. 644.]

It is thus tolerably certain that the instrumental tone used to voice
the pastoral character of the scene was the same as that