Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Program notes

About the Work

John Adams turned eighty in February 2027, and the Vienna Philharmonic has given him a whole programme to conduct: three of his own pieces, written across four decades. It opens with the shortest and best known of them.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine dates from 1986. Michael Tilson Thomas commissioned it for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Great Woods Festival and conducted that orchestra in the first performance; the piece is occasionally listed under its other name, Fanfare for Great Woods. Adams calls it a fanfare for orchestra, a label he also gave to the quiet Tromba Lontana of the same year, and the two could not be less alike. Asked about the title, he answered with a question that has been reprinted in programme books ever since: “You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?”

The piece was written in the years of Harmonielehre and the opera Nixon in China, when Adams had taken the basic tools of minimalism (a steady pulse, short repeated patterns, plain consonant chords) and begun to use them for dramatic ends. It lasts four or five minutes and employs a very large orchestra, with four trumpets, a big percussion section and two synthesizers. Everything in it is governed by one idea: a beat that will not give way, and an orchestra that has to keep up with it.

The harmony moves in the manner Adams called gating. The music holds one small collection of notes for a long stretch, adding to it by stealth, and then switches to another all at once, like a change of gear. There is no conventional cadence anywhere in the piece until the last bars.

Heard at the start of this concert, with the forty-minute Harmonielehre at the other end, it works as a miniature of the larger piece: the same pounding energy, the same bright orchestral colours, compressed into the time it takes to find one’s seat.

What to Listen For

A woodblock begins alone, very loud, and sets the beat. The trumpets join it on the same pulse while clarinets and synthesizers run at twice the speed. Keep the woodblock in your ear, because the rest is measured against it.

Soon other instruments start to disagree. New patterns enter, in the trumpets first, in rhythms that cut across the beat, and for long stretches the orchestra seems to move at two speeds at once. Adams has described the players as running a gauntlet through the tunnel of rhythm that the woodblock creates.

One published analysis hears the woodblock marking out the form as well: a high block for the first section, a low one for the second, the high one again, and then none at all. In that last stretch the brass come to the fore with broader phrases, the nearest the piece gets to a fanfare in the old sense, and it ends on the only real cadence in the score.