The oud: an instrument and its ideas

See how the account likens the instrument to a body. Ask what this idea says about how the narrator thought of music, and mark what in your answer is your own opinion.

In the record, separate what the source reports from what it attributes to a person.

Maqqari begins with a four-string oud corresponding to four bodily temperaments ². The fifth-string record gives the strings by colour and thickness: a yellow zir, a red mathna, a white mathlath and a black bamm, with the additional red string between the middle ones ². The account associates the added string with the soul in an instrument-as-body analogy ². The record presents the comparison as part of the historical explanation, useful for understanding that thinking, not for describing human physiology today ². The record on the oud holds a second writer who likens the instrument to a body: al-Mas'udi transmits from Ibn Khurradadhbih an account in which the body of the instrument is made like a thigh, its neck like a leg, its head like a foot and its strings like veins ³.

Do the colours and the temperaments give a way to calculate the sound of Ziryab's oud? The record says no. The colours are not a modern key from which frequency can be calculated, and they take part in an analogy of humours and soul, not medical evidence or an acoustic law ². It adds that symbolic colour cannot supply missing acoustic values ⁴.

Sort the reports by who makes them. Maqqari reports the four strings, the red fifth string, its place between the middle ones and the analogy ². The TDV encyclopaedia, reporting Henry George Farmer, gives a separate account of tuning, which the record calls the encyclopaedia's account of the historian, not an independent reading of Farmer ⁵. The oud pictured with the record is a later one, and the record says no surviving original supports the attribution: the evidence is a text ⁶. The account of the oud's origin in al-Mas'udi is attributed to Ibn Khurradadhbih, and its record says it needs a further source.

Maqqari ties the four strings to four bodily temperaments and the added string to the soul. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: does an idea like this belong in a report on the characteristics of the oud's music, or only in a report on how its narrator thought about music?

• The fifth string: the colours, the temperaments and the soul as Maqqari gives them, and what the record says they are not.
• The oud: al-Mas'udi's account of its origin, attributed to Ibn Khurradadhbih.
• Ziryab: the musician to whom the string is attributed, and the sources that report him.