A term used for various instruments, most often string instruments. The terms ‘lyra’ and ‘lira’ in medieval and Renaissance writings designated various string instruments (for instance Lira da braccio, Lirone and Lyra viol) as well as the ancient Greek lyra (see Lyra (i)). Tinctoris (c1487) referred to the lute as ‘lyra’, and Virdung (1511) used the term for the hurdy-gurdy, which is still called ‘lira’ in Ukraine, Belarus and Sweden (where it is also known as ‘vevlira’). Martin Gerbert (De cantu, ii, 1774, pl.5), on the basis of medieval manuscript sources since destroyed, gave an illustration of a rebec-like instrument labelled ‘lira’, and a similar instrument is called Lira (see Lira (ii)) in modern Greece. The Italian term Lira organizzata has been applied sometimes to an ordinary hurdy-gurdy, sometimes to that instrument in a late 18th-century French form with added organ pipework and bellows, and hence (like the term ‘hurdy-gurdy’ itself) to barrel organs. In bands a Bell-lyra is a portable glockenspiel.
A. Martínez and M. del Rosario: ‘Las liras prehistóricas de Luna (Zaragoza) y de Saint-Symphorien de Paule (Bretańa)’, Archaeologiamusicalis, iii–iv (1989–90), 134–6