Orchestral music begins in Italy. It also begins with the dawn of the Opera. We must first remember that the Italians always cared more for solo-singing than for chorus-singing. It was just the same with their instrumental music. Instruments playing _solo_, or holding a dialogue together, with brilliant improvisations, occupied a much higher place in the Italian taste than harmonies produced by a number of instruments playing together. In other words, the Italians preferred _monodic_ music to _polyphonic_ music. So we find in the first operas, or plays interspersed with music, that the only instruments that were welcomed were the clavecin, the organ, the _chitarone_, and the lyre. Now that combination is not as thin, nor as simple, as we might think. The clavecin and organ could supply both bass and treble. The _chitarone_, as we have just seen on page 137, was a big bass-lute known also as the archlute, with two sets of strings: one reaching all the way down the enormously long neck; the other, and shorter, reaching only about a third the way down. Each set of strings had separate pegs. The lyre was very complicated. It was a kind of viol with twelve, or fourteen, strings, tuned either in fourths or fifths, alternately ascending and descending. This very singular way of tuning permitted the performer to find all kinds of chords in all kinds of positions beneath his fingers. [Illustration: THREE CHITARONI _Seventeenth Century_] The composer carried his melodies, however, on a very simple bass. If the opera had “symphonies,” that is to say instrumental interludes, and ballet-music, the composer would often indicate in his score “at this place the instruments can play”; and the musicians selected what they pleased. As time wore on, if the composer indicated a place for one or two violins to play, he would give them a little theme; and the players worked it up and elaborated it to suit their fancy and according to their skill. Very often, indeed, they added a brilliant musical _divertissement_. The scores of the earliest Italian operas have very little accompaniment save two or three violins above a bass played on the theorbo, or clavecin. At the beginning of the Seventeenth Century a change took place in music. A great many of the old kinds of wind instruments and the grave old viols began to disappear. They were too old-fashioned for the New Art of the time. The famous opera of _Orfeo_ by Monteverde (1607) is, perhaps, the last of the great operas of that period that contained all that was considered in those days the _rich voices of the Orchestra_. _Orfeo_ is a landmark in musical history for many reasons. We shall presently see that it is also the _starting-point of our modern Orchestra_.