David Newman, son of the venerated film composer Alfred, brother of Thomas, and a part of the illustrious Newman scoring heritage, has written a slew of great original scores over the years, including many for his longtime collaborator Danny DeVito (War of the Roses, Hoffa), and lots of terrific family/adventure fare (Matilda, Galaxy Quest, The Brave Little Toaster). In recent years, Newman has moved from the A-list film scoring scene to the A-list film music concert scene, regularly conducting major U.S. orchestras during sold-out live-to-film performances of classic scores, including John Williams’ Home Alone just last month with the L.A. Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles.

For Newman, 2021 also marked something of a return to A-list cinema, but with a twist. When he was brought on board Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, Newman faced a unique challenge: adapting and arranging not just a pre-existing work, but an all-time classic. Said work represents a landmark in the careers of both composer Leonard Bernstein and the late lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Their initial Broadway production of West Side Story was eventually adapted into the Oscar-winning 1961 movie musical, and it continues to cast a formidable shadow throughout popular and classical music culture.

How, then, does a composer express fidelity towards an existing work while also providing enough tweaks for a modern-day audience? As it turns out, West Side Story has been a part of David Newman’s musical life for about as long as he can remember. We caught up with him to hear all about his thoughts on the show, and how he went about adapting the music for Spielberg’s new vision. Then, stick around for Newman’s thoughts about his father Alfred, and the practices of early film music.

Sean Wilson: First, to put the interview into some kind of context, what was your initial exposure to West Side Story, and what kind of impact did it have on you?

David Newman: West Side Story was something for me growing up. It came out in 1957 and I was born in 1954. When I was maybe seven or eight years old, we got the Broadway cast album. One of my earliest memories is listening to it with my father, Alfred Newman. He was the head of 20th Century Fox [Music] and won nine Academy Awards. I remember sitting and listening to the whole thing and being absolutely thrilled by it, even as a young child.

There’s a thing in high school or late middle school that involves doing musical theater productions in the spring semester. They would cast a musical at large that would allow anyone in the school to audition. Certainly, where I grew up on the west side of Los Angeles, it was a big, big deal. When I was maybe 14, we did a production of West Side Story. This was probably 1969 or 1970. I was the rehearsal pianist. So for four months, I rehearsed incessantly after school. It’s so hard, and it’s young kids. So I spent a lot of time playing West Side Story. Then, in my 20s, I went to USC as a violin performance major. Essentially, one part of USC is a conservatory of sorts. It’s a large university but in terms of Los Angeles, the west coast at the time, that was the place. You’d either go to USC, Juilliard or Curtis. Or maybe Indiana. I was working playing violin but I had a semi-pro theater group with these friends of mine. We’d all met in high school doing plays. We did about six summers, and one summer in college, we did West Side Story. I was maybe 24 or 25 and I was the music director. I rehearsed and I got to conduct a union orchestra.

I started writing music when I was about 28 years old, maybe around 1985 or 1986. I’d gotten a conducting masters; I wanted to be a conductor and had no interest whatsoever in composing. My conducting went nowhere so I did start composing. I conducted all my film scores. Around 2005, I started conducting film concerts, although I had done some in the late 1980s, because I’d run the Sundance Institute Film Music Program. Here and there, I’d conduct a film music concert but nothing regular.

However, starting in the mid-2000s, I was regularly conducting at the Hollywood Bowl. In 2011, we premiered the film version of West Side Story with a live orchestra. That completely changed everything. It went on to be booked hundreds of times in the ensuing couple of years. It’s the perfect marriage of art music, theater music and drama and movies. I’ve probably done that 40 or 50 times with every major orchestra in the U.S. And then in 2018, Steven Spielberg, on the recommendation of John Williams, hired me to, quote, unquote, “arrange and supervise the music for West Side Story.”

It’s the only job like this that I’ve ever had, and it’s kind of hard to describe. It isn’t really an arranging job. It’s not really an orchestration job, either, although there were elements of both. It’s a singularly unique movie. It is not a filming of a show, but it is the show. It is completely, purely West Side Story, particularly the music. We had to be very careful with what we did with the music. If the choreography needed something, you can’t just write something. You have to go and find Leonard Bernstein’s stuff, pop it in and make it seamless. We toyed with changing the orchestration a little. Not that we didn’t change it, but 95% of it was not changed. The minute you start messing with it, it doesn’t sound right.

There were a couple of things that guided us. For me and Garth Sunderland, who supervises the music for the Leonard Bernstein estate, the symphonic dances of West Side Story are part of the canon of classical music. It’s about a one in a million percentage. It’s minuscule what goes into the canon. What that essentially means is a piece of music is played by most orchestras once every couple of years. You’ve got your Beethovens, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and so forth. West Side Story is part of that. It’s not just some show. It has a very storied pedigree. It’s 1957, so it’s almost 60 years old. The 1961 movie was done three years after the show. The original orchestrators on the Broadway show were the orchestrators and arrangers on the movie. Therefore, we felt that the movie was fair game to pull from as well, musically.

The lyrics, I wasn’t as involved with. The late Stephen Sondheim was the original lyricist. The team working on Spielberg’s movie changed the lyrics here and there. Sondheim was, throughout his career, famously willing to allow artists to adjust his lyrics. That said, it’s not like changing a lyric to a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical where everyone is now deceased. If the lyrics had to change, it was with the blessing of the original lyricist with Spielberg, writer Tony Kushner and Sondheim collaborating together.

The Boys of West Side: Leonard Bernstein, left, Stephen Sondheim, right.

My job was to make sure we didn’t go off the reservation. I did do some underscore cues. I pulled them from incidental music in the show or the movie. There is an arrangement of a song that is different, but there is a precedent for it being a bit different. It’s one of the most famous songs, but in the Broadway show, it’s not sung by a main character. It’s in the middle of a ballet. So, in the 1961 movie, it was done in another way, and then we did it another way in our movie. That’s the farthest afield that we went. The music needed to be the north star of the whole process.

SW: There is a phenomenally talented vocal cast involved in the new film, including breakouts like Rachel Zegler. When it came to working with the vocalists, were those responsibilities split between you and the other production members?

DN: Yeah, there was a big team. I was doing the orchestra stuff and then Jeanine Tesori did the vocal coaching. Matt Sullivan was the music supervisor. Shawn Murphy, the mixer, has been John Williams’ engineer forever and Steven knows him really well. And then David Channing was our vocal editor. There was also Garth Sunderland acting for the Bernstein estate. This project emanated from the Bernstein estate, which is run by Bernstein’s children. Everyone weighed in a lot.

Again, it’s not something I normally do. It was a bit of a learning curve. But it turned out, to my mind, and I’m not prone to hyperbole, magnificently. It feels like West Side Story, but it’s a movie. I was trying to think of a metaphor. If you a production of a Verdi opera, or Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, it’s going to be the same music and essentially the same words. Our movie is slightly different but 90% of the lyrics are the same. But the hundreds and thousands of productions of Tristan und Isolde are wildly different. You can see Tristan und Isolde in an old medieval setting, spun as an old Nordic tale, or on a bare stage with nothing. It really changes your experience as an audience member. But the point is that it’s a great work of art and it needs to be performed for each new generation.

This is the whole idea of Western art. The reason why music, be it concert, opera or whatever, is played over and over again is to show it to different generations in an attempt to try to clarify what it is. I thought Spielberg clarified this for our generation and how we live now. The political nuttiness that we’re in right now and clarifying the motivation of the Jets and the Sharks. Why they do what they do. It’s still set in the era that it was always set in. It’s not even changed the setting. There’s just much more motivation to everything. Maria has much more agency, more like Shakespeare. But they didn’t pull from anything without there being a precedent.

Everything in the movie feels authentic. There’s a lot of Spanish in it that, instead of feeling cynical, just feels real and authentic. You can understand why the gangs do what they do. It still has that sense of it being a beautiful love story, and everyone lives in a tempest. The choreography’s a little different, even though it still looks like Jerome Robbins’ choreography. It’s just much better suited to a movie. I love the 1961 movie passionately. I know that movie backwards and forwards almost to a fault. But this is like a fresh take on it, and it’s thrilling. Also, it sounds, if I may say so, magnificent. It’s better than any West Side Story album out there. I know all of them, and of course, I’m maybe not objective.

Spielberg is also a genius with the Foley and the dubbing, which is essentially the mixing of the movie. They are just the best. They’ve dubbed all of Spielberg’s movies and they totally understand his vision for the music. They know how to use music. They don’t just whack up the music and then turn down the effects. In most dubs, everything is so rigid. Here, everything is used to tell the story. Obviously, the music in West Side Story is hegemonic, but the way they use the sound effects to increase the drama is just thrilling. I focused on it because we in the music department are naturally focused on the sound elements. It is also the most beautiful cinematography, a gorgeous looking film. I normally can’t sit through anything in which I was involved. I just see too many mistakes. I’ve now seen it twice and both times I’ve lost myself in it. None of the music makes me cringe.

The New Team: Jeanine Tesori, left, Gustavo Dudamel, right.

It was a lot of hard work for all of us in the music department. The movie was prepped and shot in 2019. Post-production started at the end of 2019. We still hadn’t recorded everything, we did a lot of post-recording. That’s when the conductor Gustavo Dudamel came in and we had to re-record everything anyway. And in March 2020, we were going to go back to New York and finish it with the New York Philharmonic. And boom—March 2020, New York shut down. We shut down for six months. So, to finish it was a nightmare. We had to do it in Los Angeles, although fortunately, we could use Dudamel’s orchestra, the L.A. Philharmonic. He’s the music director of that orchestra and they’re fantastic. But we could only have strings in the room at any one time because of COVID. It made post-production a nightmare. We started mixing the soundtrack and we couldn’t be together. We had to do it over Zoom and, finally, it let up and we could all get in the room to finish everything. It was just impossible to finish the movie via Zoom. Jeanine Tesori was in New York and I was here in L.A. I was in my home and Matt Sullivan was present at the mix. I would never go through that experience again. You can do lots of things but you cannot mix over Zoom.

SW: Did that experience accentuate the sense of achievement when you did all get back in the room together?

DN: It did because we’re all very experienced and we’ve all worked together in the past, excepting Jeanine. That said, she’s fantastic. Jeanine was on the film the longest out of any of us. She was in on casting for obvious reasons. They’ve got to ensure that the actors can sing. Finally, Jeanine could fly out here to L.A. and we all got together. Then it was easy to do. It was literally impossible without us all being in the same room. You can’t hear enough nuance.

SW: It’s a testament to the dynamism and richness of the soundtrack recording that all of those problems simply fade into the background. One simply wouldn’t know that any such disruption had taken place. It’s also a testament to the indestructible, canonical reputation of Leonard Bernstein’s music.

DN: A lot of people aren’t classical music purists. From 1750 to the present day, that’s considered canon. Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven and so on, then the romantics and then the 20th-century artists. Out of all the music written for orchestras and chamber music during that 250-year period, there are maybe 300 to 400 pieces considered canon. It’s got to be one in a million to make it into the canon and West Side Story makes it in there.

The American-born Leonard Bernstein makes an orchestral arrangement of the music from the original show and it makes it into the canon. That means it will be played forever as long as Western music continues and there’s an orchestra that can perform it. It’s hard to fathom that. One simply doesn’t mess with it. It is timeless. Everyone knows it. It’s a unique Broadway show, as well. It bridges vaudeville with musical theater with opera and ballet. The original show is mainly a musical ballet with a little bit of dialog. It has hardly any dialog, the show. The way it was conceived was so different from anything that came before and after. I cannot think of any movie except our movie that has successfully figured out how to present that as a movie-going experience.

SW: It’s fascinating isn’t it, because ordinarily, a film composer facilitates a director’s story, in this case, Steven Spielberg’s. And yet you’re using somebody else’s music to tell that story.

DN: We don’t really look at it that way, though, because it’s West Side Story. We all love it. We all probably would have done it for free. Staging West Side Story in high school is almost the most exciting thing you can do at that age, unless you’re on a winning sports team or something. There are hundreds of people involved. And everyone’s doing it because they love it. Making this movie had the same kind of feeling, even though it was very difficult and there were a lot of arguments. It wasn’t exactly free of human intercourse. One really didn’t think of oneself at all. The honor of being able to be involved in West Side Story—that was it.

SW: You mentioned the dubbing and the mixing earlier, which Spielberg is fantastic at, like you said. Is a successful mix of both music and sound one of the pivotal cornerstones of any scoring project?

DN: Yes, and it’s very hard to get right. There are reasons it doesn’t happen very often. Like you said, when you’re doing a movie, and you’re the film composer, and it’s your music, you’ve then got the sound mixers and sound editors doing their own thing. Then you’ve got the dialog mixers, as that element also needs to be heard. It can become a boxing match, maybe. It’s intrinsic in the system. But Spielberg has a vision of music. He grew up as a musician. He didn’t become a professional, but in the States we’re taught music classes learning specific instruments. That’s certainly true of people of my age and Spielberg’s age. Whether you do anything with the instrument is beside the point. You get a taste of it and for some people, it clicks. For others, not so. And for Spielberg, it clicked.

He just gets how to do it. We composers often ask, why is the music there if it’s not being used? It’s not that it has to be particularly loud; it just has to be used. Otherwise, don’t put it there. That’s the struggle. Pre-dubbing might take six, seven, eight weeks, and the final mix might take a week or two. Generally, there is no music at the pre-dub stage. They’re taking lots of dialog stems and sound effects and they are making them into tracks, combining things, balancing things. They’re also doing Foley and ADR, additional dialog recording.

Most of the time, the team is not running the music, and if they are, they’re not listening to it. That’s not their focus. Then comes the final mix, and all of a sudden the music needs to be used. And guess what? They’re used to all the other stuff because they haven’t been paying attention to the music at all. The music is mixed and done and stemmed out and ready. It might not even be there during pre-dubbing. A composer might be scoring during pre-dubbing. Basically, one shows up at the final mix and there’s the music. And one has had no practice with it. One doesn’t know where the phrases are. One doesn’t know what the composer intended in this scene or that scene. “I can’t hear the dialog?” “Well, just whack down the music.” And the effects people have been sitting with the director for weeks and weeks, and people bond when they’re together.

They’re used to all the other stuff because they haven’t been paying attention to the music at all.

It’s a systemic issue and it takes a very experienced director to know not to sit there forever. Such a director knows to give his or her team the permission to use music to tell the story. They have signed off on all the music and have been to all the scoring sessions. They’ve been through this huge process. Presumably, they know the music and then they get to the dub. Of course, it’s going to sound different because sound is sound. It takes a person who likes and knows how to use music. They know what their proclivities are going to be. Maybe they’ll bond with a sound effect that they like, and then the music comes and it drowns out the sound effect, so the music is dumped. Spielberg just happens to be good at it. He gets what music is there for.

SW: You mentioned having to take special care when adapting the music of West Side Story for this particular movie iteration. Are those same principles of care important when you’re conducting a live concert of someone else’s music, and not necessarily West Side Story?

DN: Every situation is different and every hall is different. A live performance is a different animal than what we were doing on this movie. With this film, we were recording. If it’s done live, then we’re not necessarily going to reorchestrate it or rearrange it. There’s none of that, but live performance is live performance. It’s going to change. And West Side Story, as I said, is a unique artistic endeavor. There’s nothing like this. But when I do the 1961 movie, there are things that are accented. It’s not easy to play. You have to rehearse it and emphasize certain things.

SW: Bernstein’s original score has so many different idioms within it, from jazz to Puerto Rican rhythms. That must be very exciting to tackle.

DN: It is. The score is difficult, but not as difficult as it was when it first came out. The orchestras are much better at playing it now than when the film first came out. You can hear a lot of struggling in the 1961 movie. But 60 years later, we’ve also come so far in terms of technology. That’s why we were adamant about making this as perfect as possible, and I don’t just mean the notes being played. I mean the feel of the whole thing—the phrasing, the feel, the jazz, without being ostentatious about it.

When there’s pizzicato bass in “Cool” for example, we had a stand-up jazz player on it. That’s the feel. Things like that. We did a lot of stuff, but much of it isn’t noticeable. That’s the whole point. It’s just to make it feel right. Playing “Cool” with a bassist who’s not a jazz bassist is hard, you know? There are other things, like the dance at the end of the gym, which is called “Jump.” It’s a little jazz piece, which contains an incredibly intricate jazz bass part. It’s different performing it live compared to what we were doing on the movie. We could get players to do certain things.

SW: One final question, David, but it’s a big one, and it pertains to your father, Alfred, who was one of the founding fathers of film music. Did he impart any particular philosophy to you about how to gauge the effectiveness of soundtrack music?

DN: It’s a very interesting question. There were five of us in the family. I was born in 1954 and my father was born in 1900. So, I was 14 when he passed away. That’s why one of my most cherished memories is the time we spent listening to the West Side Story Broadway cast album together. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve made a study of Alfred Newman. I’ve read a lot about him.

I am utterly fascinated by the 1930s when talking films started. Alfred came to Hollywood in 1930, very close to when Max Steiner came. Arguably, him, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Dimitri Tiomkin created film music. One of my father’s very first scores was for a film called Street Scene. It’s a 1931 RKO picture, and there’s an overture with the Street Scene melody. There’s an interlude in the middle of the movie. There’s no music for about an hour and then there’s an interlude when the city wakes up. Then there’s something at the end with the end title.

That’s one way of scoring a movie. Then, he did a film called Mr. Robinson Crusoe, which was a vanity project of Douglas Fairbanks’. He went to an island and wanted to shoot a movie so it would pay for a vacation. He’s just on an island doing stuff like Robinson Crusoe. My father wrote music for that film from beginning to end. It’s like a silent film. The music doesn’t really say anything—it’s fast and slow by turns, just not what we would think of as a film score.

That particular score looks towards models such as the 19th-century melodrama, Beethoven, perhaps, or the incidental music from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These classical canonic composers often created incidental music, so after a scene was over in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, the orchestra would play some music. But they would never play in real time while the play was going on. Little by little, they came upon this concept that they termed “commentative music.” What we think of as film music today has its origins in so-called “commentative” scoring. What that means is one writes music [that] is going along during the scene, not in-between scenes to get from one scene to another. One is commenting on what’s going on in an abstract musical way.

I learned this over the last 10 years when I discovered that a film composer named Fred Steiner had written a biography of my father. Very little is written about Alfred Newman, generally. He was kind of shy and not one to talk himself up, really. I don’t think his legacy has quite gotten the attention it deserves. I learned a lot about him via Steiner’s biography. But Alfred Newman’s philosophy of music has a lot to do with this idea of writing music that comments—thematic music, using a Wagnerian model with maybe an Italianate vocal sensibility, at least when you think of the Golden Age of film music. The music is very pretty and song-like, Italianate, but it’s also Wagnerian in the sense that there are themes and motifs used to delineate characters or ideas or feelings. In Wagner, a leitmotif could represent a feeling or a person or an object. It could represent a sword in the Ring Cycle, or Valhalla, or Wotan or whatever it is.

Then there was the issue of spotting that Alfred talked a lot about. Where does music start, where does it stop and where do you decide not to use music? He and Steiner talked a lot about that. That is an immensely important aspect of film scoring because when you start music, it almost doesn’t matter what the music is. The start point itself is meaningful. And the point at which you end music is also meaningful. While the music’s going on, the music in and of itself is meaningful. But where you start it and end it is also meaningful. That’s part of the art form as well.

Alfred Newman also had a huge research department. They started off in the 1930s using lots of source music. They developed these libraries of sheet music so they could do Irish or African or any other kind of ethnic music, even if lots of it was probably wildly inaccurate by today’s standards. When they did source music, they thought of it as scoring. My dad did a movie in 1935 called Rain. It’s an early Joan Crawford movie, a bizarre one, but all done with source music, dance music. The music doesn’t happen unless she’s playing a record. They’re all stuck on this island because it’s raining and a weird love triangle ensues. It’s a very dark noir movie. Crawford plays a hoofer, a dancer, and she keeps putting on records of different music. She’s either walking around with her quintessential black hair or dancing.

The use of source music was very important to Alfred. Also, if you look at his score for The Diary of Anne Frank—that was 1959, and you can sense his thoughts about spotting. As they’re waiting in the attic in the middle of the day. What he chose to score for Anne’s character, for her view of life. The main title has it, but particularly the end as she’s being taken away by ambulance. One can also look at his score for All About Eve, which is arguably his masterpiece. All About Eve only has 30 minutes of music in a two- hour-and-10-minute movie. The end cues of All About Eve are some of the finest film scoring of the 20th century. There’s also quite a bit of source music used, but thoughtfully.

All About Al: Newman, and Eve.

At the time, the composers themselves did all the source music. In contemporary films, there are music supervisors, there are songs used, but in Alfred Newman’s era, it was all the music department that did it. The score for How Green Was My Valley was all based on Welsh folk music, but it was used as score. It’s used to give a sense of timelessness to the village in the story. But at the end of All About Eve, in the last five minutes, a brand new character is brought in that is instrumental to the story. You could arguably say that she is a main character, despite only being in it for five minutes. Without that scene, the story is completely different. And the music, if you go from the beginning, you see the way in which Alfred Newman sets up the world of the theater and Broadway. There’s a scene in which all the characters are introduced by Addison DeWitt, George Sanders’ character, and it’s a tour de force in leitmotif technique. The way he introduces it, and the way Alfred introduces the main character Eve, and the way the music falls into Eve—there’s much intellectual grist for the mill if one is enthusiastic about analyzing music. The intervals, the harmonies—it’s fascinating, and, in my opinion, if not his greatest score then one of his greatest accomplishments.

—FSMO

Click here for the West Side Story album review.