Crescendo

Crescendo is a movie about the organization of  a youth orchestra bringing together young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. I don’t know if it’s based on a true story, but I’m sure there have been a number of efforts to bring the two groups together, probably musically as well as other ways.

The conductor assigned to this task is an older man, and though he’s initially reluctant, he seems to be wise about how to get people to open up and cooperate.

After the musicians are chosen he tells them to yell all the bad feelings they have against each other. After all that is in the open they can get down to rehearsing.

Once the musicians have been selected they’re taken to the Austrian Tyrol to rehearse. They are to end with a concert, and it’s not clear what happens after that. The conductor talks to a young Palestinian man about studying music with him in Europe, but the young man is reluctant, feeling obligated to continue working with his father playing music at weddings and other community functions.

At least two scenes made me cry, at least partly because of the music. The first is when the orchestra plays a portion of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, music I dearly love. When the music ends the conductor tells them they’re no longer just Israelis and Palestinians, but musicians able to work cooperatively to produce beautiful music.

Sometime after this he tells the orchestra that he had grown up in the region of Austria where they’re rehearsing. His parents had been Nazis, and as World War II was ending had tried to escape, but had been killed near the border. He says he had been devastated and bitter for a long time, but now he had gone to Israel, and had had the privilege of working with young and talented musicians like them.

Only a little later, when they’ve gone on an outing a car drives by and throws what looks like a paint-filled balloon at the conductor. He isn’t injured, but we are left to infer that someone in the region doesn’t like what he’s doing. Very likely they don’t like Israelis; they may not like Palestinians either.

Meanwhile, a Jewish girl falls in love with the Palestinian young man spotlighted throughout the film. She seduces him, then foolishly sends a picture of them together to a friend. The friend sends the picture to her parents. They are not pleased.

They tell her she must come home, and send her uncle after her. She decides to run away instead, and persuades the Palestinian boy to go with her. They’re stopped along the road, and when they try to run away we hear what sounds like a vehicle running into what sounds like a body. We never learn the exact details, nor who did it, but learn that the boy is dead.

The girl is taken away by her uncle, the concert is canceled, and in the last scene we see the two groups in the orchestra in an airport waiting room, separated by a plastic or glass barrier. The intention of the orchestra seems to have been entirely frustrated.

But then the young Israeli man gets up, goes to the barrier, takes his bow and taps out the rhythm to Ravel’s Bolero and begins to play its theme (another piece of music I dearly love).

Slowly the other Israelis join in, followed by the Palestinians. That’s the second scene that moved me to tears. Nothing concrete has changed, and yet because of the collaboration and cooperation of the two groups there seems to be the possibility of reconciliation.

The bitterness between Palestinian and Israeli is written large what exists between many of us, in this country and throughout the world. Bitterness and fear usually prevent us from solving problems, and often plunge us into violence. This movie reminds us we have other potential choices.

No Direction Home

The documentary by Martin Scorsese about Bob Dylan focuses on what was the most dramatic part of his career: the beginning of it, which lasted about six years, from 1961 (when he released his first album) to 1967 when he came off a long world tour, had a motorcycle accident, and decided not to continue down the path he was going. My first reaction when I heard about the movie (which is fifteen years old) was, why?

No, there hadn’t been a movie to cover all of that part of his career, but a lot had already been written about it, and I thought there probably wasn’t a lot more to say. I’m not sure anything new was said in the film, but all of it was worth hearing, if not very enlightening. You do get a picture of a young man making his way  very quickly, the scene he was in, and the people he knew. No question it’s a good story, and of course Scorsese makes outstanding movies.

Young talents, particularly in the world of arts, but not confined to that world, are often spectacular, but become more mediocre as the artists age. The distinction between Dylan and others was that his development happened more quickly and took in more aspects of his work than most.

Arguably, he recorded his best album at age 24. The Beatles weren’t much older when they recorded their two or three best albums. The Rolling Stones were a bit older than that, but Dylan and the two bands are similar in having, after their most striking work, retained the facility they’d developed, but not the touch of genius that had made their works compelling.

It’s interesting to see Dylan as a young and chubby Jewish boy in the years before he got famous and at the time he recorded his first album. He comments in the film that the songs he recorded actually weren’t ones that he performed in concert very much, which seems a little odd.

But the changes between his first and second albums are striking. In his first album he recorded only one original song, to Woody Guthrie, whom he idolized. And he did it by using a method Guthrie had also used: taking the tune of another song, by Guthrie, who had also borrowed the tune, and putting his own lyrics to it. Like Guthrie, he would borrow music and words too in the future. We are left to infer that had he not felt compelled to write Guthrie a song expressing what he felt he owed him, he might never have begun writing songs at all.

In his second album things had changed radically in no more than a year. He had thinned down, and the cover showed him walking down a snowy street in New York City with his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo. And only one of the songs he had recorded was borrowed from anyone else. He’d written all the rest.

Blowing in the Wind was the one that began to make him famous (I never cared much for it, even though the lyrics were appropriate to the time) since it was recorded by the already famous Peter, Paul, and Mary, but there were other good songs on the record too. In the movie he comments that he had really gotten into songwriting, and wanted to get as far into it as he could. And his fame began increasing exponentially as he released each new album.

His third album was mostly original material too, and most of it was protest songs. That one I never listened to, though I heard some of the songs. A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall was probably the most impressive one in terms of poetic imagery, but there were worthwhile others too, and he was becoming popular in certain liberal circles for his lyrics about current events. But then he decided to change again.

Many artists in various media find a style and something they want to say, and rarely vary either style or message. But a lot of artists don’t want to get locked into any particular pattern. Dylan was seen as a folk music artist, and the folk music scene abhorred electric music. The real purists thought it should all be acoustic and imitate as closely as possible previous artists and recordings. That was imprisoning, and Dylan decided he wanted to explore other ideas and forms. In that respect, at least, he hasn’t changed in the decades since. He’s tried out a variety of styles, and his messages have changed over time.

Part of the reason he changed was probably drugs. He used marijuana for sure, and probably LSD, which certainly must have opened his mind to a lot of things. His mind was already pretty open, as he tells us in the memoir he published about 15 years ago. There he speaks of going through newspapers on microfilm from the 1850s to get some idea of what was happening in the United States at that time. How many young men would even think of doing that? He also says he often stayed with friends early in his time in New York, and those friends often had interesting books, which he looked at, even if he didn’t read them straight through. So he talks about being impressed by a poem by John Milton, something I would never have considered reading at his age. Paul Verlaine too.

I don’t know that his political beliefs changed (one commentator in the movie says he’s pretty sure Dylan had feelings for underdogs),  but by his fourth album he had other things he wanted to write about, more internal things. I liked that album, but haven’t listened to it for a very long time, and it wasn’t one of his most popular, though other artists did cover songs from it.

That album began to upset people, but his next one upset them worse. Bringing It All Back Home was half acoustic and half electric, which disturbed fans who believed he should only play acoustic music. Although he had become fascinated with folk music before his career actually began, he had listened to a variety of music: country, blues, and jazz standards, and had had a rock & roll band when he was in high school. Much as he loved folk music, he didn’t want to get locked into performing only that.

He was never a virtuoso as a musician. He didn’t come up with a lot of riffs to draw attention to a song. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead once said in an interview that he was extremely good at fitting lyrics to music, or vice versa, a related but different skill, and it was his lyrics that were vivid rather than his instrumental playing. So if he wanted the musical part of what he did to be more vivid, electric amplified music was an effective way to do it.

I bought his Highway 61 Revisited album, and didn’t understand a lot of it, but felt its power. His lyrics before had been incisive, like Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the killer of Medgar Evers. Now his lyrics became surreal, but still powerful, even if you didn’t understand what he was talking about or what kind of story the songs tried to tell. Joan Baez says he told her that someday people would be arguing about the songs he was writing, and what they meant, and that he didn’t know where they were coming from, nor what they meant either.

I’ve had an experience like that on a very modest level. If you decide you have something to say and start writing a lot you eventually begin to write good things–at least some good things. Of course my percentage was much lower than his.

After recording Blonde On Blonde, another classic, he went out on a long world tour, and drastically overworked himself. After coming home he had a motorcycle accident, broke a bone in his neck, and allegedly detoxed from the drugs he had been taking to keep going. After that he kept writing songs and recording them, but didn’t go out on the road again for a long time. I never saw him perform, but I was one of the people who became disappointed in him.

In my case it wasn’t because he started playing electric. I didn’t care about that. I’d been listening to rock & roll for two years when he released Like a Rolling Stone. and liked that kind of music. I was much more upset at what he chose to do after he started recording again.

John Wesley Harding wasn’t a terrible album, but it was kind of odd by comparison with what Dylan had done before and what others were doing. Worse, from my point of view, followed. Nashville Skyline was country, and though I’m not a big fan of country, what bothered me was that he seemed to be writing superficial songs that were meaningless. Self Portrait I liked even less, as many of the songs were by other artists, and the originals didn’t seem very good.

In his memoir published a little while after the movie was released, Dylan pretty much admits that he was upset by fans demanding more of him than he wanted to give, and that some of them who showed up at his door at almost any time frightened his family. So he wrote songs that weren’t very good to get them to lower their expectations. The problem with that, the way I saw it, is that he didn’t write very good songs anymore–at least not very often.

One album seemed to be an exception: Blood on the Tracks. I loved one song, Tangled Up in Blue, but didn’t listen closely to anything else. And what I heard of the music that followed seemed to confirm my opinion. There was nothing more for me there.

That’s approximately when he began his Christian period. But I heard that as being preachy in an unattractive way, and lost interest in what he was doing.

Others felt differently, of course. Musicians still liked what he did (although Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish said he didn’t believe the late sixties version of Bob Dylan, which was pretty much how I felt). Tom Petty’s band and the Grateful Dead both toured with him, but by that time I was long past being interested.

Which is not entirely true. I read a book that was partly about Dylan’s work in the nineties and early in the new century, which was interesting, but when I listened to one of the albums analyzed, it didn’t make much impression on me. Maybe it was just too subtle.

In one interview Dylan said something about having worked to achieve a position. He certainly had done that by the end of the 1960s, guaranteeing that people would always pay attention to his work, even if it wasn’t very high quality.

But maybe me disappointment was because he was no longer moralizing in what to me was a compelling way. Maybe he had embraced ambiguity in a way he hadn’t earlier.

Reading about his later albums seems to show that he embraced a wide variety of music, much of which could be called folk music. Music from the 19th century as well as obscure songs from the 20th. He always listened more widely than most.

So maybe he decided to do what he enjoyed, musically. He’s been touring more or less continuously over at least the last two decades, so presumably he enjoys performing. If he doesn’t want to write songs with clear and significant messages no one can compel him to do otherwise. It might be accurate to say he was a great analyst of many things wrong with the world. I can’t blame him for not wanting anyone to believe he could heal the world. That’s another, and much more burdensome responsibility.

But I remain disappointed, probably unrealistically. Great artists seem to promise us many things, and he promised more than most, whether he meant to or not.

In a way, I think maybe the decades since the sixties are what we ought to be focusing on. What are the messages he’s been trying to communicate since then? Is he just putting out product that he can perform, product that really doesn’t mean much, and if so, is that deliberate?

Maybe that’s what Scorsese should have tried to find out.