Perhaps "joke" should have been "inside joke". 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. (Kind of like quantum physics: you not only violate classical algebraic commutativity, you base your entire physics on this novelty.) Once our generation grew up hearing Bernstein's music, the tritone sequence no longer hurts our ears, the way such a tritone would have hurt the ears of someone who grew up hundreds of years ago. At 09:03 AM 1/17/2018, Cris Moore wrote:
That is a famous tritone (in the equal-tempered scale, the square root of 2) but I don't think it's a joke.
On Jan 17, 2018, at 9:36 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote: Leonard Bernstein famously (in musical circles, at least) included a musical joke in "West Side Story" with the first two notes of the song "Maria", which form a *tritone* (the two "Ma ri" notes of the "Ma ri a").