For al-Farabi, the image does not represent an absent reality. Rather, the
aesthetic work–visual or musical–deposits its image in the apprehending
soul. The imagination creates melodies, performed or latent, depending on
the practiced readiness of the artist.^15 Like ibn Rushd, he describes an
image internal to the artist emerging through performance. Such an image
can either simply induce pleasure or, in embodying the‘disposition of
things,’instigate worship in a manner analogous to, but crucially distinct
from, idolatry. After all, without an object, there is nothing to idolize. For
him, the matter of music is irrelevant beside the actual object of study, the
divine, which could come as well from other substrates–nature, art,
arithmetic, or geometry:
Musical theory generally aims to study the musical being that could also be a
product of nature or a product of art. The theoretician does not have to worry if the
musical being comes from nature or art. Just as in arithmetic and geometry,
the beings that form scientific objects of study are natural or artistic products,
but the cause of their existence is of little matter to the scientist.^16
His conflation of media combines Plotonian immaterialism with the
Aristotelian idea of music as affective (inward) image–perhaps reflecting
al-Kindi’s translation of a book including paraphrases of Plotinus’s
Enneadsas“The Theology of Aristotle.”^17 For Aristotle, musical mimesis
functions as
an intrinsic capacity of musically organized sound to present and convey (affective)
aspects of character; the patterns of music have properties‘like’the emotional
states that can, for that reason, be the objects of their mimesis. As evidence for this
view Aristotle cites music’s power to put its audiences into states of mind or feeling
that contain, or are characterized by, these same emotions, so that musical mimesis
seems to be a case that covers what might now be distinguished, by some philo-
sophers, as representation and expression...mimesis registers itself in its direct-
ness of effect upon listeners:“our souls are changed.^18
An apocryphal anecdote related by al-Farabi’s biographers underscores
such musical affectivity. It relates that the elderly al-Farabi visited the court
of the Shi’a ruler Sayf al-Dawla (r. 945–967). When he arrived at the court,
the ruler was sitting with religious scholars (‘ulama). He said to al-Farabi,(^15) Klein, 1966 : 181–182. (^16) al-Farabi, 1930 , vol. I: 28.
(^17) Fowden, 2015 : 158; Berlekamp, 2011 : 16.
(^18) Halliwell, 2002 : 159–160. For the translation of Aristotelian notions of mimesis into Islamic
discourses, see Vilchez, 2017 : 285–300.
60 Seeing with the Ear