Whistling down the river

The words, the music -- the choreography! -- Mr. Duncan shared all of that with us in sixth grade. He probably also told us about the ending. Still, I didn't remember how it ends, unlike any other out there.

Bernstein splashes the whole musical with the tritone. That's the devilish interval ("diabolus in musica" it has been called) that you get if you start on one note, and take three whole-steps up. It recurs throughout, throughout "Something's Coming" (how terrifying is that "around the corrneeerrrrr!"). It is acoustically ambiguous -- and its the last sound in the musical.

Wikipedia: The "restless interval,"

classed as a dissonance in Western music from the early Middle Ages through to the end of the common practice period. This interval was frequently avoided in medieval ecclesiastical singing because of its dissonant quality. The first explicit prohibition of it seems to occur with

"the development of Guido of Arezzo's hexachordal system, which made B♭ a diatonic note, namely as the fourth degree of the hexachord on F. From then until the end of the Renaissance the tritone, nicknamed the diabolus in musica, was regarded as an unstable interval and rejected as a consonance by most theorists."[2]

The name diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") has been applied to the interval from at least the early 18th century. Johann Joseph Fux cites the phrase in his seminal 1725 work Gradus ad Parnassum, Georg Philipp Telemann in 1733 notes, "mi against fa, which the ancients called "Satan in music", and Johann Mattheson in 1739 writes that the "older singers with solmization called this pleasant interval 'mi contra fa' or 'the devil in music'".[3] Although the latter two of these authors cite the association with the devil as from the past, there are no known citations of this term from the Middle Ages, as is commonly asserted.[4] However Denis Arnold, in the The New Oxford Companion to Music, suggests that the nickname was already applied early in the medieval music itself:

"It seems first to have been designated as a 'dangerous' interval when Guido of Arezzo developed his system of hexachords and with the introduction of B flat as a diatonic note, at much the same time acquiring its nickname of 'Diabolus in Musica' ('the devil in music')".[5]

Mr. Duncan, the revival is very good, not great, but of course it's great. They speak Spanish in all the Sharks scenes. It still ends the same way