طرب

The Persian word inherits the entire Arabic-Islamic musicological tradition. Medieval treatises by al-Farabi and Avicenna discussed tarab as the goal of music, and the word continues to do that work in the modern tradition. Iranian classical music, with its slow, gradually building improvisations, is structurally designed to bring the listener through layers of attention into tarab. In Sufi gatherings (سماع, samâ'), tarab is the state in which the listener begins to move spontaneously, often to weep, sometimes to dance. The word is therefore loaded across three registers at once: musical, poetic, and mystical. All three readings are typically active when the word appears in a classical line.