Where is the music? It no longer seems to be accompaniment.
It seems to be the dance itself.
This opening dance number has great formal consequence.
Musicologists have shown that Bernstein’s score is tightly com-
posed. The two motifs I have mentioned from the opening
dance are building blocks or cells that give rise to many of the
songs heard later in the show. Raymond Knapp compares this
compositional technique to precedents set by Wagner or, more
pointedly, by Webern.^11 Opera singers have recorded West Side
Story(under Bernstein’s direction). Yet in the theatre the show
remains firmly in place as a musical, and the formal reason for
this stability of form lies in the book-and-number patterning
that continues to be felt even as the classical rigor of Webern
or Wagner seems to be the right context for Bernstein’s score.
The most important compositional maneuver lies in the un-
folding of musical cells into the formats of popular songs, and
in this regard West Side Storyis practicing the technique used
by the composers and orchestrators of Show Boatand Carousel.
All of these shows make drama out of the achievement of song
itself. What in West Side Storyreminds one of Webern also
heads in the direction of Tin Pan Alley, although Bernstein’s
classical determination never drops away in favor of pop tune
simplicity. The motif of the descending major triad dropping
to a pause on a tritone that accompanies the Jets’ opening
dance takes its place later as the B section of the “Jet Song.”
(“You’re never alone, you’re never disconnected”), which is an
AABA format. Reversed to a rising tritone, it is the cha-cha
melody with which the orchestra accompanies the meeting of
Maria and Tony, then it bursts out as Tony’s “Maria” number,
which is AAB-Coda. (I am following Raymond Knapp’s musi-
cal analysis here.^12 ) The other cell from the opening dance or-
chestration, a rising C-F-B, delineates a minor seventh, which
THE ORCHESTRA 143
(^11) Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, pp.
208–15, which builds on Swain, The Broadway Musical, chapter on “Tragedy as
Musical,” and Block, Enchanted Evenings, pp. 245–73.
(^12) Knapp also makes the point that “Maria” is an abbreviated song form that
leads to the more complete structure of the “Tonight” duet, an “apex of opti-
mism” in its AABA fullness. See The American Musical, p. 212.