John Coolidge Adams (b. 1947) is composer of minimalist-inspired music that has won awards and attention for almost five decades. He is also a conductor of great renown who has led orchestras and ensembles around the world. He began his musical life as a clarinetist, which led him to composing as a high school student in New Hampshire. He attended Harvard University for both undergraduate and graduate degrees in music, studying with Roger Sessions, David Del Tredici, and others. While there, he led the Bach Society Orchestra, and he was the first student permitted to write a musical composition for a senior thesis. His frustration with academic modernism, coupled with an ear for contemporary pop, led him to turn towards what he describes as “a more expansive, expressive language” that has informed his music ever since. He is especially known for his operas, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic. Among his many awards are the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his response to the 9/11 attacks, On the Transmigration of Souls. His internet presence extends as far as Wikipedia, his website at earbox.com, Boosey & Hawkes, Lumen Learning, the LA Phil, the New York Times, and the English National Opera.

Adams wrote Short Ride in a Fast Machine in 1986. Together with Tromba Lontana it is half of the set of Two Fanfares for Orchestra. It is one of Adams’s most performed compositions. Michael Steinberg’s program note reveals much more:

The most famous American fanfare is Hail to the Chief. Next comes Aaron Copland’s thumping huff and puff in honor the “the Common Man.” Most fanfares are brilliant, some even aggressive (etymologists disagree whether the word “fanfare” is onomatopoetic or actually connected with the verbal family that gives us “fanfaronade,” meaning blustering and bragging behavior), though John Adams has also explored the possibilities of the restrained and pianissimo fanfare (in his Tromba lontana).

Short Ride in a Fast Machine is a joyfully exuberant piece, brilliantly scored for a large orchestra. The steady marking of a beat is typical of Adams’s music. Short Ride begins with a marking of quarter-notes (woodblock, soon joined by the four trumpets) and eighths (clarinets and synthesizers); the woodblock is fortissimo and the other instruments play forte. Adams sees 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?”

Short Ride in a Fast Machine features the usual minimalist earmarks: repetition, steady beat, and, perhaps most crucially, a harmonic language with an emphasis on consonance unlike anything in Western art music in the last five hundred years. Adams is not a simple—or simple-minded—artist. His concern has been to invent music at once familiar and subtle. For all of their minimalist features, works such as Harmonium, Harmonielehre, and El Dorado are full of surprises, always enchanting in the glow and gleam of their sonority, and bursting with the energy generated by their harmonic movement.

Michael Steinberg (from The John Adams Reader)

Follow along in the score:

Lawrence Odom created a symphonic band arrangement that closely matches the original:

For the mere mortals among us, Richard Saucedo has created a modified transcription of the work that comes in around a grade 4. It achieves this by simplifying some rhythms and transposing the piece down a major third:

Read on about Short Ride in a Fast Machine at Wikipedia, the LA Phil, Boosey & Hawkes, the Indianapolis Symphony, and Adams’s website.