West Side Story: An Unappreciated Masterpiece

so I've seen a lot of people asking me about musicals and music on the stage and stuff like that and I figured that if we're gonna talk about musicals and we have to go for the biggest and baddest or at least by the end of this video I hope that you'll think it's the biggest and baddest musical West Side Story I mean it's February right we just had Valentine's Day and I'm totally not missing all my deadlines what are you talking about but West Side Story is a 1957 adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by the big bad bird Stein with a book which is musical ease for script by Arthur Laurents who an auto write scripts for film and the lyrics were written by Stephen Sondheim who wrote a whole bunch of lyrics and music for a whole bunch of musicals now it's important to understand that West Side Story is incredibly complicated so we're gonna go super slow step-by-step and I'm gonna walk you through it so this is how it opens and that's the whole story right there thanks for watching I like to pay transfer okay I'm not going to do that to you but I want you to remember these three notes because they are crazy super important okay so we get our opening in black and then an abstract picture of Manhattan with snippets of all the music we're going to hear throughout the show then the musical starts in earnest and we hear that opening idea again and then we get the most important part of West Side Story some intimidating snapping I don't know about you but that scares me but anyway we hear this now check it out if we ignore this note right here it's just our first motif but upside down which is technically called an inversion I'm just gonna pretend that it's on the same key signature to make things easier which is musician talk for I'm lazy but check it out and then after all that we get some good old-fashioned menacing ballet and not to discredit ballet I've legitimately been a fan of it like my whole life but this just doesn't read like tough gang member but we bump into Bernardo our first shark which is objectively the cooler gang name and we hear that first musical idea again and this is basically when we figure out what this musical idea means I found a lot of names for it the discord motif the hate motif the danger motif but in essence it's the closest thing this story gets to a villain theme at least I think kind of sorta but we'll come back to it later it is effectively a light motif or a piece of music that represents a person place or thing for the conflict or the hate between these two groups then we start getting more of that second motif which we're gonna call the Jets motif which is ironically playing while Bernardo is dancing and then we get that conflict motif the first idea when the Jets stumble onto some sharks and then we get it again and again [Music] yeah and again and again and when all that dance fighting is over we get introduced to lieutenant Schrank and officer Krupke who while we first hear their names get that Jets motif and during that scene we start seeing the police forces anti Puerto Rican stance in the conflicts indirectly aligning them with the Jets get your friends out of here Bernardo and stay out please so even though the cops are supposed to be impartial and just want to end the fighting we can see a clear definition in both the music and the narrative that the cops are on the Jets aside so when we hear the Jets singing about being Jets as you would expect we hear their motif all over the place and check it out when we first hear about Tony the male protagonist we get that Jets motif because riff is 100% convinced that Tony is a jet and is on their side but when we meet Tony it's complete silence because Tony doesn't care about the Jets anymore because he's trying to pay for Community College or something they never really explain why he's working this job moving boxes of soda down a staircase but it isn't until RIF convinces Tony to come to the dance when we hear that Jets motif Ted it is will natal first earth and I'll live to regret this Ono's but immediately following that meeting Tony starts singing something's coming check it out right here that who knows part [Music] it's just rearranged notes from the opening the conflict motif again offset for the octave and I'm trying to keep everything in a similar key signature just to keep things easier and so by now it's clear to see what Bernstein's doing he's taking this three note motif and using it as the fabric for the musical story but there's something kind of special about these three notes so in music the most basic building block is the note obviously and one step above that isn't the chord like you might expect it's the interval which is the space in between two notes if you ever hear a guitar player talking about power chords it isn't a chord that's an interval and now that I've set my comments section on fire let's get into the nitty-gritty of that so there's a unique name given to the space in between any two notes if you have two of the same note that's a unison one note right next to each other is a minor second then a major second minor third major third perfect fourth tritone perfect fifth minor sixth major sixth minor seventh major seventh and then the octave which we normally represent with an eighth now the first note after the octave is technically a minor second offset by an octave so we call that a minor ninth because only in music does eight plus two equal nine and you thought calculus was hard so this would be a major tenth because eight plus three is ten and I'm getting off-track but right here smack dab in the middle of the octave we have our tritone and a tritone is super special because it's super dissonant hear that mmm tasty that's a fun sound when you listen to a major scale you want to hear it finish [Music] that drive to the finish or as we musicians call it the resolution or the drive to resolve is created by the tritone in between these notes right here that tritone desperately wants to resolve like this but just to prove my point if I take the tritone out of the major scale we get something called the pentatonic scale which sounds way nicer but it doesn't have as much of a need to finish or resolve it can kind of go on for infinity so when we hear a little motif like this unlike the conflict motif and arguably the Jets motif this one is resolving if you look from the first note it goes from the tritone to a perfect fourth the idea is that perfect fourths and perfect fifths which are just upside-down perfect fourths are much more stable and sound more consonant because these are lower in the harmonic series and it's all kind of mathy I'm not gonna get into it but in short the tritone is resolving more like how we'd expect to see it in a more traditional harmonic sense so there's motif is kind of like the conflict motif but rearranged to be a little more stable and that's all for shadowing this big moment so we meet Maria and she vapor trails us into the dance scene now you can write a dissertation on what's going on in this dance scene and I'm not masochistic enough regardless of what rumors you might hear out there in the Internet to go through this whole thing so instead I'm just gonna skip it because okay paid enough let's just jump straight to the one tune that everybody knows and loves [Music] so check it out you might want to put on a helmet cuz this is gonna blow your mind right here it's three notes just three notes but if you're paying attention it's just a rearranged version of our three note motif that's been driving the whole thing but the way this motif is rearranged tells the story of how Tony and Maria come together see there's a lot of special qualities about a tritone like it's called a tritone because it's three whole steps or major seconds however you want to call it but if you arrange all the notes in between the octave the tritone sits right in the middle it's literally the furthest point away from the octave in that way you could consider the tritone to be the opposite of the octave these notes are opposite one another intervallic Lee speaking which is appropriate considering how this whole story is a reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet these are two people coming together from opposite worlds but wait there's more this motif resolves in a similar way to this something's coming motif but instead of resolving to the perfect fourth from the first note it resolves upward to the perfect fifth this is arguably a stronger resolution the cadence on Maria's name implies a more traditional harmonic resolution to the dissonance of the tritone Tony and Maria coming together is a resolution of the conflict between their two families but on top of all of that this is a rear the motif that represents conflict in some ways these two coming together is literally a resolution to the conflict between their two families established in the opening of the film what's more is that the motif from something's coming serves as an intermediary step between the conflict motif and the Maria motif it's literally in between these two motifs which also just so happens to be musically foreshadowing Tony meeting Maria at this dance these three notes just these three notes are intervallic lemo typically and arguably light motivic Allah expressing exactly what's happening in the story but following that we get what is objectively the best song in the entire show and if you disagree with me you're wrong it uses this alternating pattern of 3/4 and 6/8 to give it that driving rhythm now I'm not gonna pretend like I know what that technique is called I think in the score it's labeled as a hop hang go but I've heard a lot of people disagree and have their own ideas about it so if you're ever around a music nerd tell them that you think it's clearly in 4/4 and watch their heads burst into flames but what's more important in this tune is what you don't hear listen what you aren't hearing our three notes they don't show up at all this is the first time in the entire show where you don't hear some permutation of our motif not even a tritone why because this has nothing to do with the central conflict of the film or Tony and Maria it's Anita and Bernardo singing about their experiences in America free from the conflict in the heat of the film and immediately following that we get tonight involving Tony and Maria which also suspiciously has no prominent tritones in the melody one source that I found suggests that the perfect Forson fits that you might find in the melody are there to sort of suggest the resolution from the Maria motif but maybe there's just no tritones because there's no conflict the world went away so to speak which is the exact opposite of the next tune you get where the Jets are making fun of officer Krupke and we hear the Jets motif over and over and over again and this is alright before we hear one of the Jets use the main conflict or hate motif as an alarm whistle which is interesting because one that makes it diegetic as in this whistle and the motif is a part of the West Side Story world in two you really start seeing the musical subtext that Bernstein's laying out for how he perceives the conflict the Jets motif is just the conflict or hate motif upside down and is also associated with officer Krupke and lieutenant Schrank who repeatedly discriminated against the Puerto Ricans the Puerto Ricans on the other hand have little to no relationship with either of these motifs at the cost of arguably not having as much of a clear and concise musical identity themselves but when they do express themselves musically like with America they don't have any trace of musical conflict with the Jets in this way Bernstein is painting a musical picture where the Jets are the overt racist aggressors whereas the Sharks are only fighting for their survival and just to hammer this point home when the Jets whistle to warn for the cops it isn't any kind of motif and following the intermission we get one of the most famous Tunes that everyone knows is that one song that's really fun to sing even though nobody ever really knows all the lyrics and like tonight this tune doesn't have any tritones in it either but it has a much more prominent emphasis on perfect fourths you can actually see how the main motif to the melody is made up of two interlocking perfect fourths in essence the ideas of the love between maria and tony is supposed to give the two main characters a type of escape from the conflict in hate of the story but I imagine that seeing a friend come home from a dance late at night and then start dancing around your dress shop the next day talking about how she feels pretty might make you think that Tony could be code for something but immediately after that Tony and Maria go through a mock wedding like seventh graders during recess it's weird how fast this movie goes but then you got to remember that Romeo and Juliet all happened in like what a week and they were like 14 or something but something happens here - in what I can find online like in this source and from what I worked out on the piano the score is in G flat major but right here before their vows it modulates or switches to C major G flat major - C major is a tritone in fact if you look at the circle of fifths which is our roadmap for key signatures you can actually see how try tones are harmonically opposite one another so literally as they start going through the vowels on their mock wedding the score subtly alludes to how these two characters come from polar opposite backgrounds in stark contrast to that we have the rumble which basically recaps the entire film up to that point musically speaking and it's just in case you passed out at any point during the first act which of course finishes the same way the film opens with that conflict motif and of course that main conflict hate discord danger motif whatever you want to call it it shows up in the knife fight [Music] but immediately following that fight and a hallucinogenic Lea motivated dance on the roof we get somewhere which is a really interesting tune like a lot of this musical I found all kinds of people arguing all kinds of different points about how and why this tune works within the context of West Side Story but I have my own stupid hypothesis see in order to musically represent getting away from the conflict it looks like Bernstein uses perfect intervals like fourths and fifths that's something that everyone talks about but technically the octave is also a perfect interval so I think he wanted to use the octave to have this giant sweeping melody for the two to sing together well at the same time trying to get as far away from all the fighting as possible as represented by the tritone but unfortunately there's already another song out there that prominently features an octave leap in the melody that also prominently features the words somewhere [Music] so instead at least as far as I think he used a different interval the next one down is a major seventh but that's pretty dissonant and can sound like a tritone to the uninitiated so I think he's stuck with the next one down which is a minor seventh but again there aren't any tried tones around so by now when these two are together all the fighting and conflict in hate is left behind even though he literally just stabbed her brother like to death and this is all in direct contrast to the Jets see here when the Jets are trying to cool off after the fight you can still hear that tritone in the melody even though they're not around the Sharks boy crazy boy even before the tune starts when the Jets are rallying they rally to the sound of that conflict motif unlike the sharks during America even when the Jets are alone they're still thinking about that conflict and that hate and in essence are still occupying the role of aggressor it's a really subtle bias that permeates the musical language of this story this is why at least I think some people choose to call this the hate motif because it indicates that the Jets are hateful while the Sharks are just trying to defend themselves but immediately following that Jets scene we get reminded of how just in case you hadn't been paying attention that Tony needs to stay hidden which is effectively highlighted by that same conflict motif when Anita almost finds Tony but the two songs you hear right after that called a boy like that and I have a love is interesting because these two songs pit the sisters against each other Anita is trying to convince Maria to leave Tony and Maria is trying to advocate for why she should stay with him but pay attention to this part right here when we switch from one song to the other [Music] Oh while Anita is making her point with a boy like that we're in D flat major but when Maria starts singing I have a love we modulate to G major just like in the wedding vows those two key signatures are a tritone apart demonstrating the transition from one side of the conflict to the other but right before the end of the show we have the saddest moment during Anita's assault at the drugstore we hear a distorted version of America a song that she used to celebrate everything she loved about America being thrown in her face by the clear musical villains of the story and by the end we see how that experience has changed her was right if one of you was lying in the street which is all cadenced by the finale the conclusion to the entire musical system as tony dize maria briefly sings somewhere completely unaccompanied as much as she might try even the score can't keep them together and as the story ends we hear an alternating tritone in the orchestra that never resolves which is a direct contrast to what we see on screen while we see the Sharks help the Jets carry Tony away the score mocks Maria with somewhere only to finish with an ominous tritone a combination of polar opposites that never resolve never come together the same conflict that got riff Bernardo and Tony killed there's no resolution the story doesn't have a happy ending in many ways the two sides fighting isn't the central conflict of the film the core message of the story comes from Tony and Maria trying to escape the fighting altogether but the two sides don't sort out their differences the only potential resolution is shot dead in the street and in the end the conflict and the hate is what survived guns with hate when I can get through because now I have hate and what we hear are those polar opposites who can't even play at the same time a fantastic ending to a fantastic story and to think this massive classic retelling of Romeo and Juliet all told with just the spaces in between these three notes you know I wasn't kidding when I said that this was the whole story thanks for watching I'd like to thank my patrons for making as big as possible with a very special thank you to AFN Matt Andrew Luke Billy Vazquez Clara tan dr. whoa Donovan Hodges Hayden Elsa Karen Rosa now Who am I Enzo boot um and devil also if you're interested more about West Side Story please check the description for links to all of my sources I could not have made this video without them so please give them the clicks they deserve this one in particular is a great write-up with the tritones in West Side Story I would have missed half of them without it and this book about Bernstein's work was the only reason I learned that the conflict in the Jets motifs were leading versions of one another so please go check them out and the others in the description also a big thank you to everyone who requested this video if you want to request a video keep an eye on my patreon page if you like what you saw here be sure to check out my other videos and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting the channel on patreon but that's all I got for now thanks for watching

Channel: Sideways

Views: 777,845

Keywords: West Side Story, West, Side, Story, Bernstein, Musicals, Stage, Musical, Tritone, Maria, Tony, Jets, Sharks, Intervals, West Side Story: An Unappreciated Masterpiece, Leonard, Music, Music Theory, Musical Theory, Modulation, Key Signature, Motif, Leitmotif

Id: aQlgiO29QT4

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2019