On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Perhaps "joke" should have been "inside joke".
Saying this is an "inside joke" is sort of like saying that Beethoven repeats the same sequence of repeating a note three times, followed by a descending third as a musical joke in the first movement of his fifth symphony. The tritone is a unifying theme through the entire score of West Side story, from the opening notes of the overture to just before the end of the final musical underscoring where it finally resolves. It's the opening notes not only of Maria, but also of Cool and Something's Coming, and occurs in a bunch of other places in the score.
Bernstein, like any other musical innovator, took a classical rule of musical composition, and not only violated it -- he obliterated it -- he made this violation THE key element of the Maria song, as the tritone sequence gets repeated over and over again.
West Side Story is a brilliant piece of music, perhaps Bernstein's best. But his use of the tritone is hardly innovative, or something that obliterates a rule that existed at the time. I don't see how anyone who has ever listened to the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg from a half century earlier can consider the use of the tritone, or the use of dissonance in general in West Side Story, to be an innovation. Andy