No it doesn't.
<parenthesis>
The saying 'A picture is worth a thousand words' started to make an impression on Google Books – anachronistically, but you know what I mean – towards the end of the nineteenth century, but it really took off in the twentieth:
The value of a picture
(and the meaningless arriviste)
It's a useful rule of thumb for any writer: showing is much more effective than telling.
But this century, mercifully – for the most part – since I hung up my pen (professionally, that is; I still knock out the odd word), a meaningless variant has reared its ugly head. If I were writing for a living now I fear I would repeatedly be 'reminded' that 'a picture paints a thousand words'.
</parenthesis>
Composers of music have a tool that does the same sort of job: word painting. Choral singers are constantly reminded of this. I have written many times about this. One of my favourite examples of this comes in Fauré's setting of Libera me: Libera me... in die illa tremenda ... quando coeli movendi sunt... et terra, dum veneris judicare saeculum ("spare me ...on that terrible day... when the heavens move... and the earth [too ...
<word-painting_note>
It's the music that underlines this addition: Quando coeli movendi sunt (reaching the tonic, after a repeat)...<human-reaction>]...et terra...(plunging down a seventh – not quite an octave)
A clap or two of thunder never hurt anyone.
</human-reaction><human-reaction></word-painting_note>
Oo-er. Feels more like an earthquake. Maybe I should be taking this more seriously
</human-reaction>
]... It's the music that underlines this implied too.
<word-painting_note>...dum veneris... (Now it's a full octave.)
<human-reaction>
!!!
<language-teaching-note>
English is unique in my (limited – the few languages I have studied in any detail are all Indo-European) experience in that it treats verbs in this sort of future as being in the present tense. But the future here is important; we make this sort of point in English by saying something like 'And it's a matter of when rather than if'. The octave drop makes it clear that this coming is inevitable.<forthcoming-concert>
Coincidentally, I was impressed during a rehearsal for A night at the movies (see below) by Stephen Sondheim's exploiting of this in the words to America, which I have previously mistakenly 'corrected' in my memory to 'I think I'll go back to San Juan'. Sondheim needed to maintain the rhythm of da-da-da-'go back...'; so the singer says, in her Puerto Rican accent, 'When I will go back to San Juan...'. Brilliant.
</forthcoming-concert></language-teaching-note>
.... In an earlier post...</human-reaction></word-painting_note>
<deja-lu>Longtime readers may get a feeling of having read this before. They have; but I wrote this before fully realizing how useful these pseudocode chunks are. So I've tried again.
</deja-lu>
 |
| The two octave plunge So the number of octaves isn't relevant. The descent is represented by a number of octaves (or, if acoustics is your Thing, division of the frequency by 2 or 4 or...). Returning to our forthcoming concert, a choral suite based on songs from West Side Story... |
A night at the movies features vocal classics (some choral, like 'O Fortuna'...
<tangent>
from Carmina Carmina .../Let's Carl the whole thing Orff
(not my joke, but a good one)
</tangent>
...as used in many a horror film, some less formal like 'Siddown you're rockin' the boat':
)
</forthcoming concert>
<singers-device>To make sight-reading less daunting, a singer often remembers intervals with reference to particular songs. A perfect fifth, for example, is 'Ba-ba black sheep'. That's a common one. But each singer will have their own list. For me, a minor seventh is Andy Williams's 'I'm a home-loving man'. (Very fond of minor sevenths, Mr Williams; 'Now solitaire's the only game for me', etc.)
</singers-device>
for the tritone 'bane of a child violinist's life', as I have said elsewhere:
<pre-script>
(bane of a child violinist's life, especially in the key of Bb if memory serves*, not that I stuck at it for more than a year or two; couldn't stand the noise)
<footnote repositioning-rationale="for later post">* Close, but no cigar. I was thinking of the key of F major (which involves a tritone stretch on the A string. (It all comes flooding back: An inch boy, an inch. Don't you know what an INCH looks like? My teacher, a dreadful old woman, was a fan of neither Galileo ...<clarification>
(the father, that is, though doubtlesss the son "helped" with his father‘s experiments on string lengths and pitch)
</clarification>
...nor Pythagoras.)
<eppur-si-muove date="2026">
Come to think of it though, Bb would probably work as an example, as I seem to remember it involves a similar stretch. But F major was the one that came to mind – as it was my first exposure to the dreaded tritone.
</eppur-si-muove>
</footnote>
</pre-script>
But my thoughts about tritones in West Side Story will have to wait for an update. There's stuff to do in the garden.
b
PS
Don't miss the concert on 10 June.
Update: 2026.06.07.19:10 – added PPS
PPS
Early in West Side Story Tony sing's 'Something's Coming'', and although this song precedes 'Maria' in the story, it was written much later; so Bernstein already knew what that something was; it was Maria. In Humphrey Burton's biography, Leonard Bernstein, quoted on WestSideStory.com
The melody of “Maria” begins with the tritone interval Bernstein pinpointed as the kernel of West Side Story “ . . . in that the three notes pervade the whole piece, inverted, done backwards. I didn’t do all this on purpose. It seemed to come out in ‘Cool’ and as the gang whistle [in "Prologue”]. The same three notes.”
The song "Maria", written originally as early as 1949 for the aborted East Side Story (though with lyrics written much later by Stephen Sondheim). As I wrote in that earlier post:
<pre_script>
[I had just referred to something striking me] And "Something" is an appropriate choice of words, as it relates to the song Something's Coming at the beginning of West Side Story; specifically the introductory words, when Tony's still stacking bottles of pop ...
Could be,
Who knows?
... before deciding to sing.
<tangent>
Readers who have seen only the Spielberg remake should note that this mise-en-scène refers to the original. The remake may have been a pop-free zone – I don't remember.
</tangent>
Each ...<inline_pps>Correction: only the second – I misremembered.</inline_pps>of these lines includes a tritone [HD 2026 I had peviously glossed this as 'three whole tones', but I now find it more useful to think of it as six semi-tones: a perfect fifth is seven semi-tones; a perfect fourth is five semitones; a diminished fifth and an augmented fourth split the difference at six.]....
[And] In the later song Maria (and Maria transpires to be that something) the same tritone is there, but spelt differently (it's a rising diminished fifth this time, rather than a falling augmented fourth). Bernstein is telling the audience something, and it's only taken me sixty-odd years ...<autobiographical_note>
The film (which the older of my brothers saw in the West End) premiered in 1961, but I heard the original Broadway cast recording in the late '50s.
</autobiographical_note>...to notice it. I wrote "later song Maria", though Something‘s Coming was an afterthought (as explained here), so Bernstein knew de antemano as they say in Spanish...,
<tangent>
And there's another thing that I've no time to pursue: calques, or "loan translations". Which came first, de antemano or beforehand? ante = before, and mano = hand (where those "=" signs have a fairly loose sense of equivalence).
</tangent>...what the "Something" was, and what it would lead to....
</pre_script>
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