Re-inventing the musical
West Side Story marked a radical departure from the romantic nostalgia-infused content that audiences had come to expect from musicals. It was also structurally more ambitious, by incorporating the musical complexity and subtlety of opera.
Although West Side Story resembles other successful musicals in being made up of a series of distinct songs interspersed with spoken scenes, it is more like opera in having a musical coherence, which runs through the whole work. One technique Bernstein borrowed from opera was to have a musical signature that appears at the beginning of the show, and then recurs throughout the score. The hallmark of West Side Story is a tritone, a musical interval formed by three tones, which imbues a melody with a feeling of yearning and desperation. It appears at the opening of the hit song 'Maria' then reappears in other songs where some of the tritones are layered on top of each other. This allows contradictory emotions to be expressed simultaneously, while also binding the whole work together.
Integrated into all this are the powerfully evocative dance rhythms that Howard Goodall believes were inspired by Bizet's Carmen. Here the ambiguous fusion of Latin American and classical rhythms carries the plot forward: the dances are not an unnatural interruption of the story but an integral part it. One of these rhythms is called the hemiola. This is very characteristic of Latin American music and is an appropriate motif for West Side Story's gang The Sharks, who are Puerto-Rican immigrants.
How tritones add poignancy to melody
A tritone is an interval of two notes exactly three tones – or six semitones – apart. Whether the notes are played together as a chord, or one after the other (as in the opening two notes of the song 'Maria'), the sound is strangely disconcerting – in fact, medieval composers were forbidden to use this interval, which was called diabolus in musica, 'the devil in music'. Nowadays it has numerous other names, such as the augmented 4th or the diminished 5th, but it always has a feeling of incompleteness, seeming to yearn to reach upwards to the perfect 5th, as it does at the beginning of 'Maria'.
The hemiola's role in rhythm
This is a rhythm with built-in ambiguity, popular in Latin American dances. A hemiola is where two notes take up the same amount of time as three – either played at the same time or with the two rhythms following one another. For example, in a rhythm made up of six beats – 1 2 3 4 5 6 – you can divide those beats into two groups of three or into three groups of two.
In the first case, the emphasis or accent would be on beats 1 and 4, like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6
In the second case, the accent would be on beats 1, 3 and 5, like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6
In a hemiola, these are alternated, so the rhythm of the whole piece sounds like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 |
1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 |
This is the rhythm of the song America in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story.
I like to be in Ame-ri-ca
OK by me in Ame-ri-ca
Everything free in Ame-ri-ca
For a small fee in Ame-ri-ca
Sometimes the 1 2 3 4 5 6 rhythm is played at the same time as the 1 2 3 4 5 6 rhythm – a hemiola style that has been used a great deal in classical, pop and jazz.
