Ru
EnI. Zavada
Genre and style models of jazz in musical dramaturgy of L. Bernstein’s “West Side Story”
The published article is devoted to L. Bernstein’s “West Side Story” (1957), one of the generally recognized masterpieces of the classic Broadway musical. Characterizing this work, experts invariably note the complexity and obvious academic orientation of the musical language. At the same time, however, the significant role of jazz (as a relevant genre of mass music of the 1950s) genre and style models is emphasized. They were unanimously identified by many researchers as the main means of creating an American national flavor in this musical. This article is intended to reveal the role of the designated models in the musical dramaturgy of “West Side Story”. The undertaken analytical research allows us to assert that the genre and style models of jazz music, found at the level of orchestration, texture, metro-rhythm, harmony and melody, acquire weighty dramatic significance here. In particular, the orchestration contributes to the visual opposition of two plot lines – love and social, which is captured by means of academic and jazz sound respectively. The dynamics of this conflict are recreated on the melodic and harmonic levels with the help of multidirectional vectors of development of the mentioned means of musical expression. The intensity of the social conflict is realized by the concentration of dissonant sonorities, the transition from the blues mode to the dominant diminished one, the weakening of functional harmonic relations and the prevalence of modality; the development of the love relationship of the main characters is accompanied by the activation of the role of classical harmony and the increase in the consonance of the overall sound of the musical material. The confrontation of two warring gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, is illustrated with the help of metro-rhythmic “formulas” (grooves) and textural clichés of the jazz mainstream and Latin American popular music.
Key words
genre of musical, jazz models, orchestration, melody, harmony, metro-rhythm organization, musical dramaturgy.
For citation
Zavada I. Genre and style models of jazz in musical dramaturgy of L. Bernstein’s “West Side Story”. In: South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2025. No. 2. Pp. 95–103.
