John Adams

• Born: February 15, 1947, Worcester, Massachusetts
  
  

Short Ride in a Fast Machine

• Composed: 1986
• Premiere: June 13, 1986, Mansfield, Massachusetts, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting
• Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 piccolos, 2 oboes, English horn, 4 clarinets, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, bass drum with pedal, crotales, glockenspiel, sizzle cymbal, snare drum, suspended cymbals, 2 tam-tams, triangle, 2 tambour de Basque, 3 wood blocks, xylophone, 2 synthesizers, strings
• CSO notable performances: First: February 1992 Iván Fischer conducting. Most Recent Subscription: October 2017, Louis Langrée conducting. Most Recent: November 2022 Lollipops Concert, Daniel Wiley conducting.
• Duration: approx. 4 minutes

John Adams is one of today’s most acclaimed composers. Audiences have responded enthusiastically to his music, and he enjoys a success not seen by an American composer since the zenith of Aaron Copland’s career: a recent survey of major orchestras conducted by the League of American Orchestras found John Adams to be the most frequently performed living American composer; he received the University of Louisville’s distinguished Grawemeyer Award in 1995 for his Violin Concerto; in 1997, he was the focus of the New York Philharmonic’s Composer Week, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and named “Composer of the Year” by Musical America magazine; he has been made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 1999, Nonesuch released The John Adams Earbox, a critically acclaimed ten-CD collection of his work; in 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for On the Transmigration of Souls, written for the New York Philharmonic in commemoration of the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and was also recognized by New York’s Lincoln Center with a two-month retrospective of his work titled “John Adams: An American Master,” the most extensive festival devoted to a living composer ever mounted at Lincoln Center; from 2003 to 2007, Adams held the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall; in 2004, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “for contributions to society” and became the first-ever recipient of the Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, which included residencies and teaching at Northwestern University; he was a 2009 recipient of the NEA Opera Award; he has been granted honorary doctorates from the Royal Academy of Music (London), Juilliard School and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern universities, honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and the California Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

John Adams was born into a musical family in Worcester, Massachusetts; as a boy, he lived in Woodstock, Vermont, and in New Hampshire. From his father, he learned the clarinet and went on to become an accomplished performer on that instrument, playing with the New Hampshire Philharmonic and Sarah Caldwell’s Boston Opera Orchestra, and appearing as soloist in the first performances of Walter Piston’s Clarinet Concerto in Boston, New York and Washington. (Adams first met Piston as a neighbor of his family in Woodstock, and received encouragement, advice and understanding from the older composer, one of this country’s most respected artists.) Adams’ professional focus shifted from the clarinet to composition during his undergraduate study at Harvard, where his principal teacher was Leon Kirchner.

Rather than following the expected route for a budding composer, which led through Europe, Adams chose to stay in America. In 1972, he settled in California to join the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where his duties included directing the New Music Ensemble, leading the student orchestra, teaching composition, and administering a graduate program in analysis and history. In 1978, he became associated with the San Francisco Symphony and conductor Edo de Waart in an evaluation of that ensemble’s involvement with contemporary music. Two years later he helped to institute the Symphony’s “New and Unusual Music” series, which subsequently served as the model for the “Meet the Composer” program, sponsored by the Exxon Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, which placed composers-in-residence with several major American orchestras; Adams served as resident composer with the San Francisco Symphony from 1979 to 1985. He began his tenure as Creative Chair with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with the premiere of City Noir on October 8, 2009. He also served as Composer-in-Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic during the 2016–17 season.

In his compositions through the early 1990s, Adams was closely allied with the style known as “Minimalism,” which uses repetitive melodic patterns, consonant harmonies, motoric rhythms and a deliberate striving for aural beauty. Unlike some other Minimalist music, however, which can be static and intentionally uneventful, the best of Adams’ early works (Grand Pianola Music, Shaker Loops, Harmonium, the brilliant Harmonielehre, and the acclaimed operas Nixon in China [1987] and The Death of Klinghoffer [1991]) are marked by a sense of determined forward motion and inexorable formal growth, and by frequent allusions to a wide range of 20th-century idioms, both popular and serious. His links with traditional music are further strengthened by consistent use of conventional instruments and predominantly consonant harmony, this latter technique producing what he calls “sustained resonance,” the quality possessed by the acoustical overtone series of common chords to reinforce and amplify each other to create an enveloping mass of sound. Adams’ recent compositions incorporate more aggressive harmonic idioms and more elaborate contrapuntal textures to create an idiom he distinguishes from that of his earlier music as “more dangerous, but also more fertile, more capable of expressive depth and emotional flexibility.” Among Adams’ commissions are On the Transmigration of Souls (New York Philharmonic, commemorating the tragedies of September 11th, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and the 2005 Grammy Award as Best Contemporary Classical Composition Recording), My Father Knew Charles Ives (San Francisco Symphony) and The Dharma at Big Sur (composed for Los Angeles Philharmonic for the opening of Disney Hall in October 2003).

For the recording of this work by the San Francisco Symphony (Nonesuch), Michael Steinberg wrote:

Short Ride in a Fast Machine is a joyfully exuberant piece, brilliantly scored for a large orchestra including two synthesizers. Commissioned for the opening of the Great Woods Festival in Mansfield, Massachusetts, it was first played on that occasion, 13 June 1986, by the Pittsburgh Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. The steady marking of a beat is typical of Adams’ music. Short Ride begins with a marking of quarters (woodblock, soon joined by the four trumpets) and eighths (clarinets and synthesizers), but the woodblock is fortissimo and the other instruments play forte. Adams describes the woodblock’s persistence as “almost sadistic” and thinks of the rest of the orchestra as running the gauntlet through that rhythmic tunnel. About the title: “You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?” It is, in any event, a wonderful opening music for a new American outdoor festival.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda