Awesöme Orchestra Session 34 - Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from ‘West Side Story’”,
Awesome Orchestra will be performing “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story” a purely instrumental adaptation of the original musical. It’s become almost as well known as the songs themselves mostly because the music is crazy fun. You’ll hear elements from all over the musical but the man himself broke it down into the following movements:
Prologue (Allegro Moderato)
"Somewhere" (Adagio) @ 4:16
Scherzo (Vivace e Leggiero) @ 7:52
Mambo (Meno Presto) @ 9:55
Cha-Cha (Andantino Con Grazia) @ 12:04
Meeting Scene (Meno Mosso) @ 13:18
"Cool", Fugue (Allegretto) @ 13:44
Rumble (Molto Allegro) @ 17:27
Finale (Adagio) @ 18:55
The piece usually runs a little over twenty minutes depending on how “risky” the conductor feels. Really, the musical styles in this piece are immense, including the many Puerto Rican styles, post bebop jazz, the already well established American musical theater tradition, and of course the European concert orchestral tradition. Managing the transitions between all these styles requires makes for a wonderful piece of music but it is tremendously hard work.
I won’t go into detail on the plot as it’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet a story that gets referenced in popular culture more than the Bible [citation needed], but here is the basics of what you need to know (also please, please, please go see a production and or watch the movie, you really need to see the dancing to really appreciate the work as a whole. Here’s a short gif from the film version).
Two rival youth gangs struggle for control of a 1950’s New York City neighborhood. Tony (Romeo) has left the white gang (we’re never given much more than clues to their ethnicity) known as the Jets. They compete with the Puerto Rican gang known as the Sharks and Maria’s (Juliet) brother is their leader. The old story of star crossed lovers breaks out and things go pretty much like how Shakespeare wrote it, except of course that Maria totally lives in this telling.
Each group gets music based on their respective cultural backgrounds. The fascinating things about this piece is how well Bernstein brings all these styles into a unified whole to tell a classic story of doomed love and conflict between cultures. Apparently, the original working of West Side Story had the central conflict between Jews and Catholics.
Bernstein, the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents, was deeply aware of the potential for tragedy when members of different cultures cultivate hateful and exclusionary attitudes. Changing the characters from Jew and Catholic to “American” and Puerto Rican keeps the many of the same ideas at the core of the story (although it would be a mistake to say effect would have been identical).
West Side Story is really on the of great works of American art. First off, it’s essentially a story of immigrants, struggling to stake their claim to Americanness or more specifically to “whiteness”. This is why it’s interesting to know that the show was originally conceived as between Catholics and Jews because those two groups defined the conflict between newly arrived immigrants in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. This change makes a little more sense thinking of it in this light.
Second, it’s really freaking awesöme music. The music of the United States and of Puerto Rico are both the result of the coming together of a number of different cultures but primarily West Africa and Spain (African slaves and the descendants of the colonizers) in Puerto Rico and in the United States from West Africa Britain, France, Germany and the Caribbean (as the centers of the slave trade were the traditional colonial ports of power in the Gulf of Mexico). Bringing together these two families of music, Bernstein creates something uniquely American and something people seem to keep loving.
Listen for the recognizable interval that serves as a unifying device for the work: an F# to a C, a tritone. You’ll hear it every and it forms a starting for lots of material in the piece. “Maria” is the most obvious example but in a very cool characterization Tony brings his music together with Maria’s and they make something new (America!).
Just a quick word about on the massive section that encompasses about half the piece. More than any other single song, this is the dance everyone tends to remember.
"Cool", Fugue (Allegretto)
So, Cool is the song the Jets sing after a long day working at their legitimate jobs making a nice living for their families. Just kidding, of course it’s the advice sung by the Jets’ leader telling his gang to wait and kill some people later. This part of the music reflects the rhythm, instrumentation, and styles of late fifties/early sixties jazz: alto sax, vibraphone, and drums all get featured; rhythmically we are solidly in the realm of swung eighth notes (listen to that ride cymbal!!) as opposed to the straight eighth notes we hear in the sections of Latin based rhythms; sound wise, it’s ridiculously complex both rhythmically and harmonically. Oh and did you see that it’s a fugue? Writer and musicologist Nigel Simeone called it “possibly the most complex instrumental music heard on Broadway to date,” and it’s known among musicians as some of the hardest music to put together. It’s also essentially dance music. Enjoy!















