Something's Coming...

Welcome to the blog!  Over the next couple of weeks I will be exploring Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story".  "West Side Story" had an amazing team of creators including composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and a book by Arthur Laurents.

(Left to Right) Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein,
and Jerome Robbins in TIME Magazine

The original Broadway production opened in the Winter Garden Theatre on September 26, 1957.  The show originally opened to very mixed reviews but none could deny that musical theatre (or theatrical music) would never be the same again.  It was the first truly collaborative piece of theatre.  The music and choreography were as important to the telling of the story as the acting was.  All components had to reflect the inner emotions of the characters.  Many critics still believe that the best storytelling is done by Bernstein and Robbins and that the actual script plays second fiddle.

In this blog I will be looking at Bernstein's use of tritones throughout the work (something that was a fairly new concept for musical theatre up to this point), his unique use of rhythm and percussion, and more!

Tri-Tony

A large influence on Bernstein's music for "West Side Story" was the tritone.  Tritones are pitches that are separated by three (tri-) whole tones.  That interval between pitches is called an augmented fourth, as seen below.

Augmented 4th

An F# is three whole tones above a C (C-D-E-F#).  However, some tritones are separated by 6 semi-tones instead, like the diminished fifth seen below.

Diminished 5th

The Gb is six semi-tones above the C (C-Db-D-Eb-E-F-Gb).

Tritones are also part of very common chords in music like the dominant seventh chord shown below.

C7 Chord

The dominant seventh chord contains a tritone between the third and seventh of the chord (the interval is a diminished fifth).  However if this chord were in second or third inversion, the interval would change from a diminished fifth to an augmented fourth.

"...and suddenly I found how wonderful a sound can be!"

This is a clip from the concert "A Celebration of Leonard Bernstein" at Carnegie Hall in 2008.  The conductor of this performance is Michael Tilson Thomas.  They are performing the West Side Story Symphonic Dances, beginning with the Prologue.  At 4:28 is where the Prologue ends and we move on to the next Symphonic Dance ("Somewhere").

The main phrase of the Prologue, and the leitmotif for the Jets, is the musical phrase scene below:

The phrase begins almost as an arpeggiation of an A major chord, however the interval between the fourth and fifth notes is the very distinct tritone (a diminished fifth).  This phrase comes up hundreds of times throughout the course of the show.  

Up to this point in musical theatre music, we had only seen tritones as notes within a chord.  They had never really been featured in the melody, and had never been the interval on which the music was based.  But, because the music had to be a story-telling vessel and not just the lyrics, the tritones added angst, tension, and a great deal of uncertainty into the music, greatly reflecting what was going on with the characters.  

"Here come the Jets like a bat out of hell..."

Bernstein plays with the rhythms and beats in West Side Story quite a bit.  Its almost as if the ear hears something very different than the sheet music has written on it.  The strongest case of this, at least to me, is "Jet Song".  Here is a sample of the sheet music:

At the beginning of the song we are told that the piece is in 6/8 meter.  Both parts in the piano reflect that time signature correctly.  The base line keeps a strong pulse on beats 1 and 4 throughout the entire piece and the treble line, although mainly made up of syncopations, is still accurately written in 6/8.  However, take a look at the melody line that the character Riff sings.  The line is still in the meter 6/8 but it is annotated as if it were in 3/4 with three quarter notes. If the same line were correctly annotated in 6/8 it would be a quarter note followed by two eighth notes tied together followed by another quarter note.  However Bernstein does not do this.  The two time signatures are drastically different.  While the downbeats for 6/8 are on 1 and 4, the downbeats in 3/4 are on 1, 3, and 5.  When both of the lines come together, it doesn't sound much like 6/8 or 3/4.  Instead it has the feeling of being in 4/4 or 2/4 with the piano treble line having a bit of a swing rhythm and the vocal line also having a swing feel all in triplets. Here is an example (starts around 0:21):

So as you can hear, it does sound more like 2/4 or 4/4 with a swing.  But since it is written in 6/8, the swing is actually annotated for us.  Playing what is written on the page with exact precision will give us the swing feel without having to add anything else.

"I like the island Manhattan! Smoke on your pipe and put that in!"

No song from "West Side Story" has become as iconic as the one seen above.  "America" is yet another example of Bernstein experimenting with rhythm.  Meter changes were not unheard of in musical theatre.  Granted, old Tin Pan Alley writers tended to stick to 4/4, 3/4, or 6/8 and to an AABA song form but composers like Richard Rodgers (especially in his work with Oscar Hammerstein II) stated to use meter changes a bit in the 40's.  However Bernstein went where no other musical theatre composer had before.  The song "America" had (as you can see in the image above) a consistently changing meter every other measure from 6/8 to 3/4.  Although the value of the eighth note stays the same the accents change each measure.

What this meter change accomplishes is motion.  The 3/4 measure propels the song forward and almost feels as if the song is running for a measure and then stays in place for the 6/8 measure.  Some say that the meter change is a hemiola, which is technically inaccurate because they are not happening simultaneously but instead happening one after the other, but it is also written in the Habanera dance style.  The following is a clip of the production number "America" from the recent Broadway revival of "West Side Story".

"Maria"

"Cool"

"Jet Song"

"Something's Coming"

Looking at the selections of music above (and considering typical musical theatre music of the time), you might guess that they were instrumental lines involved in the accompaniment of a piece.  However, the sections above are all vocal lines in "West Side Story".  This show was one of the first times that tritones were an essential part of the melody and were accented.  However, a score made entirely of tritone leaps would probably end up sounding atrocious (not to mention much harder to perform).  What Bernstein also does is frequently use a raised fourth or a lowered fifth from the root of the key in the melody.  So he accomplishes the same thing by doing that.  It still adds the angst and excitement while making the melody have a line and a direction.  Lets look a bit more closely at some of the examples above.

"Maria"

In "Maria"the tonic key is E-flat.  The augmented note that is added is A natural (an augmented fourth from "do").  In this line he uses both the augmented interval between the first two pitches, and then uses the augmented pitch in a stepwise motion in the line.

"Cool"

In "Cool" the key is C major.  Again, Bernstein uses the augmented fourth interval.  In the first two measures that pitch is an F sharp because he is writing in C.  In measures five and six he has tonicized the fourth of the key, so he is writing in F.  However, in F, the augmented pitch is now a B natural.  In this example, Bernstein only uses the tritones in the interval of an augmented fourth.

"Jet Song"

In "Jet Song" the key is C Major but in this example Bernstein is writing in A Major so the tritone is a D sharp.

"Something's Coming"

In "Something's Coming" the key is D Major so the augmented pitch is a G sharp.  The first two times the pitch is used it is preceeded by a pitch three whole tones above it.  However, the rest of the time, the G sharp is used as an appagiatura or a passing tone.

These are just four of several examples throughout the entire score of "West Side Story" (both in the vocal line and in the accompaniment).

"...maybe tonight..."

Bernstein's "West Side Story" is a revolutionary piece of music for the American theatre.  His use of the tritone in particular changed the dynamic for composers of musical theatre.  They had to continue to be edgier in order to survive.  Melodies could no longer be overly simple or formulaic (that would become characterized as old-fashioned theatre music).  Someone who took this concept and ran with it was Bernstein's own protegee and lyricist for "West Side Story", Stephen Sondheim.  Sondheim would begin to stretch the boundaries of melodies for singers and explore music as the emotional life of the characters, not just accompaniment behind a singer, as Bernstein had done with "West Side Story".  Percussion also became an integral part of Sondheim's theatrical compositions (for instance, the large percussion section in Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd").  Bernstein would usher in a new era in musical theatre with this piece.  New music had to push boundaries and had to reflect the story.  Writing music now was more of a collaborative art with choreographers and lyricists to work with and off of.  To end our brief exploration of this piece, I will show one of my favorite moments in "West Side Story" entitled "The Dance at the Gym".  It is a perfect example of tritone use, percussion use, and the fact the Bernstein wrote this piece collaboratively with the choreographer as a dance song.