Genre with Theorbo. The theorbo is a plucked string instrument of the lute family, with an extended neck and a second pegbox. Like a lute, a theorbo has a curved-back sound box with a wooden top, typically with a sound hole, and a neck extending out from the soundbox. As with the lute, the player plucks or strums the strings with one hand while fretting the strings with the other hand; pressing the strings in different places on the neck produces different pitches, thus enabling the performer to play chords, basslines and melodies. It is related to the liuto attiorbato, the French théorbe des pièces, the archlute, the German baroque lute, and the angélique or angelica. A theorbo differs from a regular lute in that the theorbo has a much longer neck which extends beyond the regular fingerboard/neck and a second pegbox at the end of the extended neck. Low-register bass strings are added on the extended neck. This gives a theorbo a much wider range of pitches than a regular lute. The theorbo was used during the Baroque music era to play basso continuo accompaniment parts, and also as a solo instrument. Theorbos were developed during the late sixteenth century in Italy, inspired by the demand for extended bass range instruments for use in the then-newly developed musical style of opera developed by the Florentine Camerata and new musical works utilising basso continuo, such as Giulio Caccini's two collections, Le nuove musiche. For his 1607 opera L'Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi lists duoi chitaroni among the instruments required for performing the work. Musicians originally used large bass lutes and a higher re-entrant tuning; but soon created neck extensions with secondary pegboxes to accommodate extra open longer bass strings, called diapasons or bourdons, for improvements in tonal clarity and an increased range of available notes. Although the words chitarrone and tiorba were both used to describe the instrument, they have different organological and etymological origins; chitarrone being in Italian an augmentation of chitarra-Italian for guitar. The round-backed chitarra was still in use, often referred to as chitarra Italiana to distinguish it from chitarra alla spagnola in its new flat-backed Spanish incarnation. The etymology of tiorba is still obscure; it is hypothesized the origin may be in Slavic or Turkish torba, meaning bag or turban. According to Athanasius Kircher, tiorba was a nickname in Neapolitan language for a grinding board used by perfumers for grinding essences and herbs. It is possible the appearance of this new large instrument resulted in jokes and a humour induced reference with popular local knowledge becoming lost over time and place. Robert Spencer has noted the confusion the two names were already leading to in 1600: Chitarone, ò Tiorba che si dica. By the mid-17th century it would appear that tiorba had taken preference-reflected in modern practice, helping to distinguish the theorbo now from very different instruments like the chitarrone moderno or guitarrón. Similar adaptations to smaller lutes also produced the arciliuto, liuto attiorbato, and tiorbino, which were differently tuned instruments to accommodate a new repertoire of small ensemble or solo works. In the performance of basso continuo, theorboes were often paired with a small pipe organ. The most prominent early composers and players in Italy were Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger and Alessandro Piccinini. Giuliano Paratico was another early Italian chitarrone player. Little solo music survives from England, but William Lawes and others used theorbos in chamber ensembles and opera orchestras. In France, theorbos were appreciated and used in orchestral or chamber music until the second half of the 18th century. Court orchestras at Vienna, Bayreuth and Berlin still employed theorbo players after 1750. Solo music for the theorbo is notated in tablature, a form of music notation in which the frets and strings which a player must press down are printed on a series of parallel lines which represent the strings on the fretboard. The tuning of large theorboes is characterized by the octave displacement, or re-entrant tuning, of the two uppermost strings. Piccinini and Michael Praetorius mention the occasional use of metal strings. The Laute mit Abzügen: oder Testudo Theorbata that appears in Syntagma Musicum by Praetorius, has doubled strings passing over the bridge and attached to the base of the instrument-different to his Paduanische Theorba. The Lang Romanische Theorba: Chitarron also appears to have single strings attached to the bridge.