joyRiDE drew inspiration from an earlier period in my life. Nearly ten years ago, in the summer of 2005, I was on stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City playing alto saxophone as a senior in my high school band. When my band director, Jon Gomez, first received word that our high school music department was selected to perform in New York, he asked me if I'd like to write something to open the concert and commemorate the trip — something that was bursting with joy. "Maybe," he suggested, "it would be cool to take something more traditional, like Beethoven's Ode to Joy, and blend it with something more modern, like John Adams." The idea was so simple and so astounding that the assignment excited me immediately — it excited me so much that within ten days, I had completed the first complete draft of joyRiDE, a two-and-a-half-minute concert opener that borrows Beethoven's infamous melody and dresses it in a tie-dye blazer of rhythm and texture that nod humbly to John Adams's Short Ride on a Fast Machine.

– Michael Markowski