Miscellanies 6.11.88

Further, as an example of music, let David be set before us, playing the harp and prophesying at once, singing praise to God melodiously. The enharmonic genus suits the Dorian mode very well, and the diatonic the Phrygian, as Aristoxenus says. The harmony of the barbarian psaltery, then, which displays the solemnity of its melody and is the most ancient, became above all a model for Terpander, who hymns Zeus in the Dorian mode somewhat as follows: “Zeus, beginning of all things, leader of all, Zeus, to you I send this beginning of hymns.” For the psalmist the lyre, understood allegorically, would be in its first meaning the Lord, and in its second those who strike the souls more immediately under the Lord, the leader of the Muses. And if the people that is being saved is called a lyre, it is heard glorifying God musically by the inspiration of the Word and by the knowledge of God, struck into faith by the Word. You may also take, in another way, as a musical symphony the church's concord of the law and the prophets together with the apostles and the gospel, and, below it, the harmony within each prophet as the speaking persons change.