West Side Story

These are the opening minutes, in which whistles, finger snaps and dance alone, without a song, establish the relationship between the two gangs.

• The first interval of the whistled signal is the tritone, an unsettling interval spanning three whole tones. The entire work grows from this single interval.
• Finger snaps and brief silences alternate, creating a tension that seems ready to explode even though no one is fighting yet.
• Percussion carries so much weight that five of the 31 players in the original stage orchestra were percussionists. Drums and cymbals mark the movement like the actors’ footsteps.
• The film version opens with aerial shots above Manhattan and captured Robbins’s choreography in real streets. This dance is also often performed in concert as the first number of the “Symphonic Dances.”

Inside a single gym the two gangs’ dances collide, and in the middle of that uproar Tony and Maria meet for the first time.

• A medley of dances in which blues, promenade, mambo, cha-cha, meeting scene and jump follow one another without pause. Each time the kind of dance changes, so does the relationship between the two groups.
• In the mambo, brass and Latin percussion explode all at once and the dancers shout. It is the moment the dance becomes a trial of strength.
• The suddenly hushed cha-cha recasts the melody of the song “Maria,” still to come, as a dance. Even before the two learn each other’s names, the music is already singing of love.
• A performance of the mambo from the “Symphonic Dances” by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra under Gustavo Dudamel became widely known, and this passage is now beloved as a concert encore as well.

It is the song Tony sings alone after the dance, holding on to a single name just learned.

• In the first three notes that call out the name, the tritone appears and at once rises a half step to settle comfortably (resolution). The interval that was a threat in the Prologue becomes a thrill here.
• As the same name is repeated endlessly, the accompaniment waits, laid low, while the song climbs higher and higher and the feeling swells.
• These three notes reappear throughout the work, used like a leitmotif for Maria and for love.
• On the original stage it was sung by Larry Kert. In the film, the songs of Tony, played by Richard Beymer, were dubbed by Jim Bryant.

On a rooftop, Anita and the Sharks quarrel in song over their home island and their new land.

• The heart of it is the hemiola rhythm, alternating between dividing six beats into twos and into threes. The meter staggers as if missing a step, giving spring to the back-and-forth quarrel.
• This rhythm is often described as recalling the huapango, a Mexican folk dance. Handclaps and Latin percussion form the rhythm’s backbone.
• On the original stage it was a dispute among women led by Chita Rivera’s Anita, and the film turned it into a contest between men and women, reworking the lyrics as well.
• Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the film, and George Chakiris, who played Bernardo, won the Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor, respectively.

It is a jazz number that, before the rumble, or in the film after the rumble is over, urges them to rein in their seething rage.

• Over a low, slow jazz rhythm, finger snaps keep the beat, and the whole piece holds itself on the brink of bursting.
• Midway, a fugue unfolds in which several instruments take up a single melody one after another. As it piles up like a round, the pent-up energy grows and grows.
• The fugue’s subject also contains the tritone, so the unease of the Prologue keeps sounding beneath a song that urges calm.
• On stage Riff leads it before the rumble, and in the film Ice leads it after the rumble. With the change in order, the number’s meaning shifts to a song of holding back grief and rage.

On the night before the rumble, the different kinds of waiting of five characters and two gangs overlap at once within a single number.

• Tony and Maria's love song, Anita's anticipation and the two gangs' vows to fight all flow at once, each with its own words and melody. This technique of layering several melodies together is called counterpoint.
• Above the gangs' fast, sharp rhythms, the balcony scene's “Tonight” melody rises up in full voice. We hear with our own ears that love and violence are waiting for the same night.
• It carries on the tradition of the operatic ensemble, in which several characters sing their private thoughts at the same time. It sounds like the passage where Bernstein's wish to write the work like an opera shows most clearly.

After the rumble, the two lovers dream of a place with neither violence nor hatred, and this melody follows the work to its end.

• At the opening, the melody leaps up nearly seven notes in a single bound (a leap of a minor seventh). Some have pointed out that this leap resembles the opening melody of the second movement of Beethoven's “Emperor” Piano Concerto.
• On stage it unfolds as a dream ballet in which the two gangs dance together while an offstage girl's voice sings; in the film it became a duet for Tony and Maria.
• The opening melody becomes a leitmotif standing for hope and returns in the final scene. It is worth listening closely to what the same melody has come to mean by then.
• Sung by many singers, including Barbra Streisand and Tom Waits, it is widely loved as a standalone song outside the show as well.

A furious Anita and an unyielding Maria face off within a single number, until at last they come to sing the same song.

• Anita's song drives low and rough, while Maria's soars high and long. The difference in the pitch of their voices is the very difference in where the two stand.
• The number joins two songs into one. As Maria's melody seems to draw Anita in and the two end up singing together, a change of heart takes place within a single song.
• In the film, Betty Wand sang part of the songs of Anita, played by Rita Moreno. This number is cited as the prime example.