The favorite instrument of the 15th and 16th centuries was the lute. It fought for first place with the vielle, the viole, the harp, the psalterion and the portative organ, but won the fight and took its place beside the most famous singers of the day, sometimes for accompanying and again reaching the dignity of soloist, as we told you above. In the 15th century it took the form, which we see most often represented in pictures and in museums, with its six strings, graceful round body, and long neck bent back as you can see in plate opposite page 127 already described. As time went on this lute was made larger and strings were added until at the beginning of the 17th century, it was replaced by an instrument called the arch-lute or theorbo, which had twenty-four strings, a double neck, and two sets of tuning pins. The spinets or virginals, the great-aunts of our pianofortes first came into vogue in the 15th and 16th centuries. TABLATURE There was a notation called Tablature used in the 16th and 17th centuries to write down the music for lute and other stringed instruments such as the viol, cittern, theorbo. You will find, in pictures of Tablature, lines which look like our staff, but they do not form a staff, but simply represent the _strings_ of the instrument. These lines vary according to the number of strings, from four for the cittern to six for the lute. The notation showed, not the position and fingering as we write music, but the position and fingering of frets and strings. Instead of _neumes_ or notes you will find the alphabet up to the letter _j_, figures and queer dots and lines and slurs, but each sign had its own meaning and was important to the lutenist. RISE OF SCHOOLS As music outgrows childhood, Schools of Music are started. But these are not like the schools to which we go every day, but are rather music groups or centers. Suppose you were a composer and lived in New York and knew a dozen or so musicians who were writing the same kind of music as you; the music, if good enough to be known and played, would be called the New York School, or it might be called the 1925 School! Or, if you were important enough to be imitated by your followers, it would be called the Smith School, if that happened to be your name, just as those who imitate Wagner are said to be the Wagner School, and so it goes. Not a school to go to, but a school to belong to!