Avast, Me Hearties, Yo Ho!

[West Side Story] was a hit with theatre people but not with audiences. Four years later the movie came out and it became a smash. In those four years, take not that there were exactly two singles from the score because everyone said that it’s a shame you can’t hum the score. Well, of course, when the movie company put hundreds of thousands of dollars into pushing the film, and when disc jockeys began playing the songs - in other words, as soon as everyone got the chance to hear the songs a couple of times - they discovered that they were hummable and all of a sudden we had all those standards from the show. The very idea of it not being hummable is laughable. But critics and audiences have often said that about my scores, when in point of fact, anything is hummable. When people say it’s not melodic, not hummable, it makes my blood boil. It’s really a question of how many times you hear it. People have lazy ears. I would say that if people hear a score for the first time and they find it hummable, then it’s usually because they were humming it before they came into the theater…In Night Music, I finally was told that I wrote a hummable score. Everyone would go out during intermission humming ‘A Weekend in the Country’. Can you wonder why? The musical phrase is merely repeated over and over again with nine choruses in ten minutes. Anyone who uses the word hummable is suspect. Hummable really means familiar.