Monday, May 9, 2011

"...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.  

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