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John Irons
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I gave Him [God] also life
by knowing Him in my heart.
(Ibn Arabi)
In Islam, the heart is so important emotionally, intellectually and in particular spiritually that Islam and hence Arabic culture may be characterised as the foremost, perhaps the last surviving heart culture. For in Islam the heart is not only a metaphor but an objective organ for sensing, intuition and cognition – not to mention inspiration, revelation and divine insight. This distinguishes Islam from Christianity, where the heart is totally subordinate to the soul and ends up providing only one of several images for emotional life in general and for the soul.
Another important difference between Islam and Christianity may also help to explain why one religion is more vital and of current relevance than the other: the relationship between the Creator and His creation. The Christian God has created the world once and for all; His work of creation is over, while in Islam it is still in progress, not least via the mediators that are spiritually inspired by God. God in Islam may also be perceived as participating in what has been created, i.e. in man. And it is specifically in the heart, if man opens himself to the divine power it is endowed with, that he can meet with God. That is why it is said that God is closer to the individual than the individual is to himself, ‘closer to you than your own jugular vein!’ as the Koran puts it (Sure 50, 16).
Within Arabic culture, it is especially Sufism that has developed the concept of the heart into a separate doctrine and a particular intellectual practice. But to understand Sufism it is necessary to be familiar with certain main aspects of the life and teachings of Muhammad.
Islam is the only world religion which at the turn of the 21st century is rapidly expanding in several continents, especially in Africa and large parts of Asia, although also in Europe, mainly as the result of large-scale immigration from Muslim countries. Part of the historical explanation for Islamic expansion is political, now as at the time of Muhammad. Today, Islam can claim to be on the side of the oppressed, and thus to represent justice, legitimising violent outbreaks of the holy wrath felt by many Arabs at the present-day political situation. For the one who follows his heart can claim to be following God’s law, since the ardour of the heart is of divine origin according to Islam. Whoever follows God’s voice does not need any other form of legitimation. That the status of the emotions in Arabic culture may be one of the reasons why fundamentalism and religiously motivated violence is so widespread in our age is something that has not commanded much attention as yet.
The close connection – almost identity – between God and the heart assumes a different form in Islam than in Christianity, not least because of Sufism and Islamic mysticism. One striking aspect of Islam is that its mystics, spearheaded by the Sufis, through the ages have contributed to a revitalisation and renewal of this religion and prevented its institutional fossilisation, while the mystics of Christian institutions have been perceived as marginal eccentrics. That Sufism is partially marginalised and partly suppressed in the present-day Muslim world may be a sign of spiritual stagnation within Island, of authoritarian closure and collective indoctrination.
The basis for the central position of the heart in Islam is the strong element of revelation, epiphany and theophany in the life and teaching of Muhammad. Islam is in several ways a religion of revelation, since it is founded directly on the revelations that Muhammad (c. 570–632) experienced over a number of years. This is why Muhammad is called a prophet. His prophetic mission began with a number of ecstatic experiences of a visionary and in particular an auditory nature. Prophets and angels, above all the Archangel Gabriel, revealed themselves to Muhammad. In a dream Muhammad was introduced to the Word of God by Gabriel, with the order to ‘Read!’, i.e. to tell and to preach the sacred Word. This revelation was to become the foundation of his teachings. When he awoke after the dream, it was as if something had been inscribed in his heart. This is why the heart is the messenger for God’s word and spirit. But only after having such revelatory experiences over a three-year period and keeping them to himself did Muhammad in the year 612 begin to preach in public, after another revelation had ordered him to do so – with equal political and religious success.
Something was still lacking, however. Muhammad was now called upon to prove himself a true prophet by ascending to heaven and returning with a book of Holy Scripture, as when God appeared before Moses and presented him with the Tablets of the Law. This event took place during another ecstatic experience; riding his horse al-Buraq he reaches Heaven, where Gabriel leads him to Allah’s throne. Here, Muhammad learns from the mouth of Allah that he is His elect, in preference to all other prophets. God then gives him the holy Koran containing the Law. In addition, he is granted an esoteric insight which he must not share, even with believers. Thus an opening is created for mystics and Sufis who can seek their esoteric knowledge without conflicting with Islam.
Islam has a simple message. Its creed says simply: ‘There are no gods but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.’ From the outset, monotheism was a major issue for Muhammad and was particularly directed against the polytheism found among the non-Christian and non-Jewish Arabs. Because of this monotheism, Muhammad initially hoped for support from the Jews, for many of his notions and mythical figures were taken directly from precisely The Old Testament. Judaism is initially his main source of inspiration. Thus Abraham, together with his son Ishmael, is the founder of Ka’ba (also spelled Kaaba), the holiest of Muslim shrines in Mecca, chosen to be the centre of Islam after rejection by the Jews made Jerusalem impracticable. By this stroke of genius, Muhammad laid the foundation of Arab unity through Islam, since the Ka’ba was also a holy site in a polytheistic pre-Muhammadan society.
Literalists gained a strong position in Islam early on, a position they have retained to this day – as witnessed in certain Muslim regimes by sharia – secular criminal justice based on the letter of the Koran. Muhammad himself, however, opened up a wide range of interpretation in Islam. The Prophet himself contributed to this tendency, for example, by adjusting and ‘correcting’ his own revelatory experiences after the event. The oral tradition after the Prophet and his alleged sayings (hadith) have also provided a fertile ground for reinterpretation and conjecture. Sufis and chosen imams with divine insights and abilities can represent both Creation and Truth in a new form. This room given for creative reinterpretation and fresh divine revelations in Islam is lacking in Christian and Jewish dogmas of creation. Furthermore, Islam imposes no strict demands on its members, but promises a good life, in flesh and blood, with a wealth of earthly pleasures in the hereafter. To Muhammad this was more important than labouring the tortures of Hell. To suffer martyrdom, a possibility that many Islamic leaders offer on a lavish scale – through holy war, Jihad, for example – is thus no misfortune for believers, who expect rewards for their efforts and sacrifices in the other world. In other respects, Muhammad himself preaches restraint and mercy.
As a state religion, Islam enjoyed spectacular success in political terms; in a few decades after the death of Muhammad, it conquered all of the Middle East and Northern Africa, gradually establishing itself all the way from India and Persia to southern Spain, from Central Asia to Turkey. This expansion also laid the foundation for a unique cultural development where art and poetry enjoyed a central position. In poetry, the encounter between the Persian language and ancient Persian traditions and the Arabic language and culture resulted in some of the finest creations of world literature, with poets such as Rumi, Haffiz, Attar, Omar Khayyam, Sadi and Djami –to mention just a few. Islam possessed an expansive, vivid and creative language, while Christian Europe for centuries continued to write in dead Latin. The meeting place for religion and poetry in Islam is frequently to be found in Sufism, where the qualities of the heart are of crucial importance.
A HISTORY OF THE HEART, Ole Martin Høystad
4. JONNA AND HENRIK STAMPE
Ingeborg and Adolph Drewsen’s daughter, Jonna, occupied a special place in the Collin family. As her family’s first-born, she was also old Collin’s first grandchild, and she later became the first to make the head of the family a great grandfather. She was born in 1827, while her parents were living in Fredericia, but it was the Collin house which, from 1830, was to become her home and which she did not leave until she married in 1850. So from the outset she attracted the attention of the family – all the more because in temperament she resembled her father more than the surrounding flock of Collins. Like her father, she suffered all her life from an inferiority complex, despite the fact that she was highly gifted and, through her marriage, ranked high up on the social ladder as a baroness.
Her attachment to Hans Christian Andersen was characterised by this special position – in many respects she was the foremost child of the household at the time Andersen became integrated into the family, and so she was also present on most of the memorable occasions when we know that the young writer entertained the children of that circle with fairy tales and where his idiomatic style was established. In such situations he was highly aware of his role as an entertainer, discovering a style that kept the keen attention of both children and adults. Edvard Collin has passed on information about what these sessions were like – characteristically enough in a late letter to Jonna, in which he draws on their common memories: He told [the children] stories which he partially made up on the spur of the moment and partially took from known fairy tales; but, no matter whether he told his own or retold others, his narrative style was so utterly his own and so vivid that it enchanged the children. He himself took pleasure in giving his spirits such free rein. He constantly incorporated a great number of idioms that the children already knew when storytelling, accompany his words with suitable gestures. Even the driest sentence was embued with life: he did not say ‘The children got into the carriage and they then drove off’, but: ‘then they got into the carriage – goodbye father, goodbye mother; the whip went crack! crack! and they were off – at a thundering pace!’ Those who later heard him read his fairy tales could only gain a vague impression of the remarkable liveliness of how he told stories to the children.
During her childhood, she was often specially influenced by her parents’ close and – in relation to the rest of the family – extremely loyal dealing with Andersen. She thought of her own part of the family as being more in harmony with the writer’s personality, while the other Collins had a practical and sometime more corrective attitude towards him. When, in the early 1840s, Jonna had become a fine young girl, Andersen was already famous both in Denmark and in that part of Europe towards which the cultural elite in Denmark was oriented – mainly Germany, of course – and it was probably hard for her to find a suitable balance between her youthful fascination in him and a privileged feeling of knowing the famous man so well. This uncertainty was thrown into relief by her feeling that the rest of the family did not treat him ‘well enough’. She sometimes did not hide the fact that she was competing with the rest of the family for his favour, and in his attempts to convince her of their reciprocated friendship they often when with the others drew undue attention to their mutual relationship. For while, Andersen was reproached by old Mrs Collin for only having eyes for Jonna and of not to the same extent being interested in Jonna’s cousins, Jetta and Stella Boye, who were Mrs Collin’s granddaughters from her first marriage. Deep family traditions, then, were at stake, and when Jonna did not disguise her feelings of jealousy in this relationship, her feelings could easily be mistaken for infatuation – an infatuation, it should be noted, that was exceedingly transitory in nature, constantly alternating with a general wish for familiarity. A few years later, she gained this familiarity to an extent that she had hardly imagined, and which came to change her life.
Astrid Stampe's Picture Book
The sound of films before sound films
In one of the first theoretically inclined books about film music, the German author Kurt London writes: ‘the beginnings of the film were at the same time the beginnings of the soundfilm ’. This is not so paradoxical as it might seem at first glance. For in a certain sense the earliest silent films had at their disposal all the sound sources we normally associate with modern sound films.
The silent film ‘talked’. In many instances, the lines of the characters in the film were read out by people behind the screen. There were troupes of actors who specialised in synchronised recitation. And the demand was sufficient for a drama academy to be established in New York that trained actors for this particular function . It was more usual, however, for there to be a ‘narrator’ in front of the screen who regularly explained what was going on . In many cases, the narrator also ‘acted’ the characters in the film and said their lines with a distorted voice. In Japan, this function was developed into an independent art form: The so-called benshi interpreted the films and said the dialogue, accompanied by traditional music. Intertitles were kept to a minimum to allow the benshi an opportunity to display his skills. The benshis were often more popular than the film actors, and their strong position was why the silent film survived in Japan many years after other countries had switched to sound films .
The silent film also had other types of sound. In many cinemas bruiteurs, ‘noisemen’, were employed, i.e. people who provided the film with sound-effects from an arsenal of apparatus and instruments of the same kind as was later used for radio drama. In the largest cinemas, sound machines were installed. The English Allefex from 1912 could produce 50 different sound-effects – the sound of running water, for example, or bird song, storms, dog-barks, etc.
And in addition to all this, there was the music. In certain cases, various mechanical devices were played on – gramophone, pianola, mechanical piano, steam organ – or on the Orchestrion, the juke-box of the time. First and foremost, though, there was live music in every conceivable shape or form – from the lone pianist and the few musicians of the earliest years of the silent film to the large symphony orchestras of the 1920s.
In 1925, Erno Rapée tells contemporary cinema owners how to compose an orchestra to match the available finances: Piano, violin and cello are a minimum. If more musicians can be afforded, one ought to start with an extra violin and then add a flute, cornet, drums, trombone, clarinet and another violin – in that order. The orchestra can subsequently be expanded in two directions, with the addition of either strings or brass and wind instruments, depending on what type of music the cinema wishes to emphasise, although ‘the strings can be used in a more diversified way and will always constitute the nucleus of any orchestra,’ Rapée writes. Like many of the cinema conductors of his time, he had a solid foundation in classical music. After having worked as an opera conductor in Europe, he settled in USA and in 1917 was appointed conductor at the Rialto Theater, the first American cinema to have its own symphony orchestra. He later worked at Rivoli and Capitol as well as Fox Theater in Philadelphia. In his advice to the cinema owners he mentions that he had 39 musicians at his disposal at Rivoli and 70 at Capitol. At the opening of the new Roxy Theater in 1927, he conducted an orchestra of 110 musicians.
Appearances of popular singers was a regular feature of the cinema programme, but singing was also occasionally used as an accompaniment to the actual film, for example in connection with screen versions of operas and operettas. Singer and chorus from two of Berlin’s opera houses were used at the premiere of a version of Wagner’s Lohengrin in 1916 . Erno Rapée recalls that he once allowed a mixed choir to sing the funeral march from Madame Sans Gêne during a highly emotional death scene. ‘The effect was almost uncanny,’ he remarks .
Two types of sound, two types of music
So the silent film had speech, ‘natural sound’ and music at its disposal. But the reason why the term sound film is never used in this context is of course that these sounds were ‘external’ to ‘the film itself’. They were produced on the spot, inside the cinema, while the film was a series of ‘preserved’, moving pictures, possibly supplemented by intertitles. The music was played live there and then; the images were ‘recorded’ – the characters and events shown were ‘registered’ in another space and time. And while the conserved images did not change from one showing to the next, the music was always variable: Even if the musicians played the same music at each performance, there were always slight differences from the previous performances. It was not until the late 1920s that the technological breakthrough came that made it possible to conserve music and all other sounds on the same material as the images. With the introduction of sound films, all film sounds became ‘internal’ phenomena.
If one is to describe the relation between live sounds and conserved images on the screen, the term diegesis ought perhaps to be introduced. It is used in modern film theory as a term for the film’s story world – the ‘world’ in which the fictive events are enacted. The crucial question then is how we as spectators imagine the positioning of the sounds in relation to this world – whether they are a part of it or outside it, commenting on it. In the former case, one speaks of diegetic sound, in the latter of non-diegetic sound .
One could perhaps think that the sound of the silent film was non-diegetic: The various sounds are quite literally produced outside the world of the film narrative. But the ‘external’ nature of the sounds is a matter of a practical and technical nature, something that does not have any consequences for how they actually function and are experienced by the spectator in the context of the film narrative. When the films were shown in the cinema, the sounds had the same basic functions as later in sound films. The silent film, for example, had both diegetic speech (actors who stood behind the screen and said the lines of the fictive characters) and non-diegetic speech (the ‘narrator’ who stood in front of the screen and interpreted the events). The sound-effects of the noisemen created an illusion of diegetic sound. And even if the film music mainly functioned as a non-diegetic commentary on the screen events, it could also be used for diegetic purposes – e.g. when the pictures showed a scene from a ball and the cinema orchestra accompanied with a waltz that ‘fitted’ the characters dancing.
The old pianist
Although the silent film had many types of sound at its disposal, it was always live music that was the central source of sound during the performances. But what sort of music? And how was it played? In his Theory of Film from 1960, Siegfried Kracauer tells a melancholy little story about the cinema of his youth where the music ‘followed an unpredictable course of its own’. It was played by an alcoholic pianist who sat there lost in his own thoughts, never looking up at the screen.
Sometimes, perhaps under the spell of a pleasant intoxication, he improvised freely, as if prompted by a desire to express the vague memories and ever-changing moods which the alcohol stirred in him; on other occasions he was in such a stupor that he played a few popular melodies over and over again, mechanically adorning them with glittering runs and quavers. So it was by no means uncommon that gay tunes would sound when, in a film I watched, the indignant Count turned his adulterous wife out of the house, and that a funeral march would accompany the blue-tinted scene of their ultimate reconcilation .
The cinema pianist who plays what he feels like, without a thought for what is happening on the screen, is a recurring theme in literature about the music of the silent film . But can it really be true that there was no connection between music and film? We know that the music of the spectacular melodramas and the various forms of optical entertainment were carefully coordinated with the screen images. Is it not more reasonable to expect that musicians who had been trained to follow a scenic sequence with ‘suitable music’ would continue to do so when they eventually left the theatre and took jobs in the cinemas?
Because of the nature of the source material, it is difficult to answer that question. But Martin Miller Marks has at least pointed out that the oldest preserved sheet music would suggest that the early films were accompanied by ‘suitable music’ . His first example is a collection of pieces of music that were played in connection with showings of small strips of film taken using the German Max Skladanowsky’s Bioscope projector. The films showed fragments of a variety number and were used as a feature of the entertainment programme at the Wintergarten in Berlin, from 1 November 1895 until the end of the year, i.e. almost two months before the Lumière showing in Paris. The following year, Max Skladanowsky toured with his pictures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia . The music used on these occasions was written for strings plus eight woodwind and eight brass. It consisted of an introduction, fifteen numbered pieces and a finale. About half of the numbers had been specially written for the occasion by an unknown composer. There are many unresolved issues relating to this music and how it was used, but probably each of Skladanowsky’s small strips of film was accompanied by a ‘suitable’ piece – e.g. Karainskaja, Glinka’s fantasy based on two Russian songs, was presumably played as an accompaniment to a ‘Russian dance’ performed by ‘the three Tcherpanov brothers’. And if this is correct, we can confirm that the film historians – despite all uncertainty and misunderstandings – are right even so: There is at least one example of music having been played to moving pictures ‘from the very outset’.
Miller Marks’ second example is L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise from 1908, a French film that was to convince the pillars of society that the new medium could be used for something else and more than mere popular entertainment. In accordance with the high ambitions of the promoter Henri Lavédan, this first film d’art was accompanied by music written by the well-known French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. While Skladanowsky’s music is a series of small, independent pieces intended for accompanying a sequence of independent variety numbers, Saint-Saëns’ music is a more traditional composition, a thematically coherent suite comprising an introduction and five movements that corresponds to the division of the film into acts or ‘tableaux’. The music in the individual sections is closely coordinated with the events on the screen.
Film Music, Peter Larsen