WEST SIDE STORY COMPOSER PROFESSIONAL
That’s something even a top professional could have some trouble with, so there’s a little help in it that you normally wouldn’t have. The “Tonight Quintet,” when they’re going to the rumble, that’s a five-part counterpoint. My guess is that it was really difficult to sing in 1957. The way West Side Story is orchestrated, it’s a little unusual, because there’s always an instrument playing within the same range as the vocal, which is normally not the way you would do it. In the movie, it’s Tony and Maria singing it as a duet. In the show, that song is sung during the ballet, and by not even a main character. “Somewhere” is a bit of a different arrangement. © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. David Alvarez as Bernardo in 20th Century Studios’ WEST SIDE STORY. You can’t just go off and write something original. So the theme, the augmented fourth thing that’s the most recognizable motive of West Side Story, you can use that, because it’s so distinctive to the play. I’m not going to write original music, I’m going to go grab what we call ‘motives,’ which are short little melodies. If, for example, the prologue gets elongated here, or it gets shortened, I have to write eight bars in the middle of Bernstein’s prologue. What were some of the practical things that you did to marry together the music from the 50s with Spielberg’s vision? We wanted to clarify motivations, and use the technology that we have now and the cultural environment that we live in now. It’s a timeless work of art that we just wanted to clarify. If you start straying too much from ’57, it just starts to sound wrong. We had to be very careful about what we did. We opened things up, but it always had a precedent. Our job was not to change it, it was to make the best performances, the best singing we could get the actors to do, the best production, the best technology, and do what we needed to do for Spielberg. Our job for the music was to keep it in Bernstein’s vision from 1957. The music is pretty much the same, or at least anything that’s different is hidden. I’ve had a lot of West Side Story spaced out throughout my life, so this film, to me, is like a miracle. I wrote a piece for Sarah Chang that was an arrangement of West Side Story tunes that she’s played.
WEST SIDE STORY COMPOSER MOVIE
I started doing the movie (the 1961 version) with a live orchestra in 2011, at the Hollywood Bowl, and I’ve done that for 30 or 40 performances. One year, we did West Side Story, so I got to prep it and conduct the orchestra, which was mostly professional musicians so that we could actually play it. There were three of us that graduated from the same place on the west side of Los Angeles, and we did five or six musicals, one every summer. Then I conducted it because I had a theatre company. I was the rehearsal pianist in a high school production, which meant that I was playing piano after school for three hours a day, for three months, that an entire high school semester.
-GI-Gordon+Parks+1955.jpg "west side story composer")
It was unusual that he would sit and listen with me, but he loved it as much as I did. I remember listening to the Broadway cast album with my father. West Side Story has been part of my life since I was a kid.
What about your own life and the many West Side Story concerts that you’ve done prepared you for this project? The Credits spoke to composer David Newman, who acted as orchestrator and arranger on West Side Story, about his personal history with the musical, and how he worked to preserve Bernstein’s genius in this new incarnation. Pulitzer-winning screenwriter Tony Kushner changed the screenplay in ways that have been praised by critics, but the filmmakers were careful to maintain the integrity of the original authors’ works, which included using only Bernstein’s music.
Like director Robert Wise’s ’61 film, Spielberg’s West Side Story takes place in the mid 20th century, but there’s a new authenticity to this film that comes from the characters being played by age and culture-appropriate actors. The story is a musical version of Romeo and Juliet, but with the Montagues and the Capulets represented by two gangs, the Italian-American Jets and the Latinx Sharks, and in place of Romeo and Juliet we have our two star-crossed lovers, Rachel Zegler as Maria and Ansel Elgort as Tony. His film is a new take on the original 1957 Broadway musical and the 1961 classic film, which both feature music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Storyis finally landing in theaters on December 10.
0 kommentar(er)
