As I see it, none of what’s wrong with “West Side Story” justifies parsing it as a retrogressive or carpetbagging affair best consigned to the artistic filing cabinet. That imposes a too-rigid level of identity politics on something that deserves a more nuanced approach. We should understand its weaknesses while enjoying its strengths rather than turning away from them.
González-Ramírez writes that “Almost nothing in the film is sonically Puerto Rican” and that “There’s a lack of imagination in what the score could be.” Perhaps she’s right to point out that “there’s no plena, bomba, salsa, aguinaldos.” But “West Side Story”’s music in no way lacks imagination. Let’s take a stroll on over to the piano.
To play just the introduction to “A Boy Like That” (the admonition/indictment sung by Anita, Maria’s would-be sister-in-law) is to savor the foreboding gloom of the chromatic dissonance Bernstein used in the harmony. This thundercloud rumble perfectly communicates Anita’s fury. Here, Bernstein made use of a chordal texture that harkens to the Romantic and especially Impressionist traditions in classical music unavailable to, for example, Mozart in his scoring of the Commendatore’s music in “Don Giovanni.”
How do you render a furious lament as lush harmony? You score “A Boy Like That,” as Bernstein did, not just for clarinet but with the more cynical-sounding bass clarinet, and not just one of them but three, croaking out the bile in harmony pitched low. Bass clarinet choiring of this kind was not only imaginative but also profound in its ability to tell us, the listeners, just how Anita felt.
During Maria’s idealistic reply, “I Have a Love,” she sings “I have a love / and it’s all that I need / right or wrong …” and under the word “wrong” Bernstein used a chord with a shard of dissonance in it. That chord, even subconsciously, conveys Maria’s bundle of conflicting emotions, despite the straightforwardness of her phraseology. She’s sad, reeling, still frantically in love with no resolution to her plight anywhere to be found, and Bernstein gets it across with his use of tritones, unresolved musical intervals found throughout “West Side Story”’s score possessing a tortuousness that can convey as many sumptuous dimensions as marjoram.
These particular musical approaches may not be the ones an artist would use in scoring this scene if they sought to portray Anita through musical genres of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. And we certainly must, and want to, hear how New Yorkers of Caribbean descent portray themselves. In that vein, Lin-Manuel Miranda has given us a sense (yes, just a Broadway- and Hollywood-ized sense) of New York Dominican musical expression in his and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s “In the Heights.” It should be said that that musical’s film adaptation, too, faced criticisms about its authenticity.
All that said, I contest any idea that making or remaking “West Side Story” was a misstep. Rather, the “West Side Story” score is a kind of reaching across, an attempt at rendering the sensibility of others. An effort to walk, musically, in someone else’s shoes.