gained renown elevating Andalusian court culture. He also improved the
oud by making its body lighter, adding afifth pair of strings, and replacing
the wooden pick with an eagle’s beak or quill. The strings of his oud were
dyed colors according with the Aristotelian humors: the fourth (of lion gut)
was black, symbolizing melancholy; the third (of lion gut) was white, for
phlegm; the second red, for blood; and the highest in pitch, yellow, for bile.
The second red string, added in the middle, represented the soul. Similar
associations were recorded in the early twentieth century, associating the
low-pitched (bamm) string with old age, water, winter, and night, and the
highest-pitched pair (zir) with courage,fire, attractiveness, and pride.^9
Offering both practical and theoretical information on music, al-Farabi
also organizes hisGreat Book of Musicthrough similitudes. He writes:“The
sides of the square and the segment of a circle serve as the measuring
instrument in architecture...analogous to the syllogism in logic, the
strophe in poetry.”^10 Discussing stringed and wind instruments, he out-
lines an auditory iconography. The most basic music, popular song,
induces pleasure. Yet this should not be disparaged. Like Aristotle, he
believes that serious things enabling supreme happiness also cause fatigue.
Amusement remedies through relaxation, enabling a return to serious
things.^11 Like poetry, complex music evokes images in the mind.
Ultimately, music enables an affective dimension beyond language expres-
sing delight, sadness, fear, or anger in humans and animals alike, due to
their possession of a similar soul.^12 Al-Hujwiri similarly recites music’s
effects on animals–the delight of camels and asses when their drivers sing;
practices of trapping deer for the hunt by beating on a basin of brass or
tinkling bells; and how babies become intelligent sleeping to lullabies.^13
Al-Farabi uses visual images as paradigms for musical iconography. He
says:
There is a category that [in addition to pleasure and relaxation] provides the soul
with imaginings (takhayyulat), deposits within the soul visualizations (tasaw-
wurat) of things and inscribes the soul with matters it imitates. The effect of
these melodies is comparable to that of adornments and images perceptible to
the eye: for there are some that offer merely a delightful view and there are others
which...[also] imitate the disposition of things, their emotions, their actions, their
morals, and their characters, along the lines of the ancient images that the masses,
in times past, used to venerate as if they were embodiments of the gods that they
were worshipping.^14
(^9) Grame, 1972. (^10) Porter, 2000 : 111. (^11) Klein, 1966 : 193. (^12) Shehadi, 1995 : 63.
(^13) al-Hujwiri, 1959 : 400. (^14) al-Farabi, 1930 , vol. I: 13.
The Legality of Music 59