as entertainment fostered moralization against it.^29 Similarly, an eleventh-
century theoretician, al-Hasan al-Katib, underscored music as conveying
emotions in the hearer, suggesting that“the meaning of the melody is the
goal of the composer...just as with the speaker (of a language), these must
resemble the various states and circumstances (of the soul).”^30 The tradi-
tion of interpreting music through the moods it evokes persists in thetarab
tradition of contemporary Arab music.^31
Like al-Farabi, the Brethren explain music through intermedial analo-
gies, describing correspondences between the proportions of oud strings,
poetic rhythms, and calligraphy:“The attacks on these strings then have
the status of pens; the ensuing high notes, that of letters; the rhythmic
melodies, that of words; song, that of utterances; and the air conveying
them, that of parchment.”^32 Thus conceiving of music as affective image
and immaterial text, the Brethren proceed to describe music through
human proportions. They describe a child growing through musical edu-
cation, saying“it opens its hands and stretches [its arms] right and left like
a bird stretching its wings.”^33 The ideal measure of the human relation to
music resembles the animal whose capacities offlight and song exceed the
human.
Plotinus similarly uses birds as a metaphor for human levels of erudition
beyond materiality. He says:
All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense more than to the
intellectual.
Forced of necessity to attendfirst to the material, some of them elect to abide by
that order and, their life throughout, make its concerns theirfirst and their last; the
sweet and the bitter of sense are their good and evil; they feel they have done all if
they live along the one and barring the doors to the other. And those of them that
pretend to reasoning have adopted this as their philosophy; they are like the heavier
birds which have incorporated much from the earth and are so weighted down that
they cannotfly high for all the wings Nature has given them.
Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the better in their soul
urges them from the pleasant to the nobler...
But there is a third order–those godlike men who, in their mightier power, in
the keenness of their sight, have clear vision of the splendor above and rise to it
from among the cloud and fog of earth and holdfirmly to that other world, looking
beyond all here, delighted in the place of reality, their native land, like a man
returning after long wanderings to the pleasant ways of his own country.^34
(^29) Wright, 2010 :84n. 30. (^30) Shehadi, 1995 : 87. (^31) Racy, 2004. (^32) Wright, 2010 : 117.
(^33) Wright, 2010 : 146. (^34) Plotinus, 1991 : 425–426 (V.9.1).
The Legality of Music 65