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 every reason to believe that the wandering poets and minstrels of the Middle Ages used the small vielle, rebek or lyre for their accompaniments much oftener than the harp, which was more cumbersome and a greater impediment in traveling. [Footnote 27: Michael Praetorius, "Syntagma Musicum," vol. ii, Organographia. Wolfenbuettel, 1619-20.]