Leonard Bernstein

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918 and died in New York City in 1990. He composed West Side Story in 1957, and extracted the Symphonic Dances in 1960. The work was first performed in 1961 by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Lukas Foss. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 4 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celeste, and strings. Duration is approximately 18 minutes.

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Leonard Bernstein was one of those rare geniuses who excelled at every musical discipline: a performer, composer, conductor and teacher, he was also a musical ambassador-at-large with the uncanny ability to make everyone he met excited about music. When friends suggested to him that he compose a “serious” musical he was absolutely the right man for the job, for jazz and popular music ran as deeply in his blood as any other kind. Many classical composers (such as Copland, Milhaud, Stravinsky) had used elements of jazz in their works, and some popular composers (such as Gershwin) up-sized their music to fit the concert hall. None were as at home in both worlds as Bernstein, and West Side Story is his masterpiece.

The musical updates the Romeo and Juliet story to the warfare of 1950s New York street gangs. Its mastery over popular melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic styles is total: here is swing, bop, cool jazz, Latin music, ballads, and up-tempo jive. All are seamlessly integrated by a man who knew his classical procedures and who used them to give the work the kind of cohesion you’d expect from an opera by Mozart. Note how both the dangerous music of the Prologue and the love song “Maria,” as different as they are, spring from the same melodic interval, the tritone. This kind of thematic unity is what separates West Side Story from the musicals of the past, and the reason why it is so effective even today.

(It’s worth noting that the tritone, otherwise known as the augmented fourth or diminished fifth, is considered to be a wildly dissonant interval—it was actually referred to as Diabolus in musica—“the Devil in music”—and forbidden in church music for centuries. That Bernstein could use it as the first two notes of a love song—and a brilliant one at that—is another testament to the man’s musical genius and certainly to his audacity. If you listen for them, you’ll hear tritones all over the place in the music of West Side Story.)

The Symphonic Dances form a microcosm of the plot. The Prologue sets the stage for the gangs’ bitter rivalry. “Somewhere,” which follows, is a dream of peace and friendship, while the Mambo breaks the spell with the competition and aggressiveness that are the gangs’ reality. The “Cool” Fugue is all about the tension created by barely-controlled anger. The Finale comes after the death of the two gang leaders, and as Tony’s body is carried off there is still a search for that elusive “Somewhere.”