John Adams (b. 1947)
Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986)
Scored for: four flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, four clarinets, four bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, synthesizer, and strings
Performance time: 4 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: Aug 6, 1988; Hugh Wolff, conductor

“You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?” This is the feeling John Adams said he was trying to capture in Short Ride in a Fast Machine. When conductor Michael Tilson Thomas approached him to compose a short orchestral fanfare to open a music festival in 1986, Adams was still reeling from the experience of riding in a fast Italian sports car at one in the morning with a friend who was not an especially skilled driver—an experience he describes as equal parts thrilling and terrifying.

The woodblock’s incessant quarter-note pulse sets the motor of Short Ride in a Fast Machine into motion. Adams calls this inflexible, almost sadistic beat the “rhythmic gauntlet through which the orchestra has to pass.” Layers of different pulsations add to the tension and excitement. Despite the rhythmic and textural complexity, the consonance of the harmonies and repetitive melodic figurations—hallmarks of Adams’s minimalist style—keep the piece from feeling cacophonous. Finally, the woodblock stops, allowing a triumphant brass melody to break forth unrestrained, though still propelled by an inexorable rhythmic energy.

—Katherine Buzard

Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Violin Concerto No. 1 (1987)
Scored for: two flutes including piccolo, two oboes, three clarinets including bass clarinet, two bassoons, four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, solo violin, and strings
Performance time: 30 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: Aug 21, 1998; Hugh Wolff, conductor; Robert McDuffie, violin

Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 marked a turning point in the composer’s career. Composed in 1986–87 on commission from the American Composers Orchestra, the concerto marked his first full-scale concert work for orchestra. He had already established himself as a prominent composer for film and theatre, with his trilogy of “portrait” operas (Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten) putting his name on the map outside of experimental music circles. Conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who had conducted the premiere of Akhnaten in 1984 and co-founded the ACO, pushed Glass toward orchestral composition, telling him, “I’m not going to let you become one of those opera composers that never writes a symphony.” While it would be another few years before Glass produced a symphony, Violin Concerto No. 1 opened the floodgates. Glass has since penned 12 concertos and 15 symphonies.

Glass worked in close collaboration with violinist Paul Zukovsky throughout the concerto’s gestation. Like Davies, Zukofsky was an early champion of Glass’s work, having played the role of Albert Einstein in Einstein on the Beach in 1976 (a role notably for a violinist, not a singer). Zukofsky requested a slow finale played high in the violin’s register and helped Glass hone the violin part. Glass had originally conceived of the concerto in five movements but soon realized it would be too long if he followed his typical compositional processes. So, he inadvertently produced a traditional three-movement (fast-slow-fast) concerto, with a slow coda at the end to appease Zukofsky.

In composing his first “traditional” concert work, Glass set out to write a piece his late father would have enjoyed. As the owner of a record store, his father exposed him to a wide variety of music growing up, often bringing home records that didn’t sell well—usually string quartets and contemporary music—to try to understand what was “wrong” with them. He was especially fond of the great violin concertos by the likes of Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky. In tribute, Glass embeds a subtle musical nod to his father, with the solo violin spelling out D-A-D in long descending notes after the introduction of the first movement.

The first movement features Glass’s characteristic pulsating rhythmic figurations in the orchestra, crosscut by the solo violin’s arpeggiations or long-line melodies. A hallmark of Glass’s post-minimalist style, small motivic cells are developed in repetition through cyclic processes of addition and subtraction—a wholly different method of development than Classical sonata form. But development through repetition is not wholly without precedent. The slow movement takes the form of a Baroque passacaglia in its series of variations over a repeated descending bassline. The soloist spins out a doleful, leaping melody, which is taken up by other instruments across the orchestra as the violinist swirls around them in eighth-note triplets. The finale marks a return to the propulsive energy of the first movement, further enlivened by a bevy of colorful percussion, but ends in a state of rapt contemplation.

—Katherine Buzard

Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904)
Symphony No. 9, From the New World (1893)
Scored for: two flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings
Performance time: 40 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 9, 1936; George Dasch, conductor

“Any one who heard it could not deny that it is the greatest symphonic work ever composed in this country . . . A masterwork has been added to the symphonic literature.” Rarely is a critic’s review of a new work indicative of the future that piece will have, but in this case, Henry T. Finck, writing for the New York Evening Post, was spot on. Since the premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” on December 16, 1893, the symphony has become so beloved and ubiquitous—its many hummable melodies instantly recognizable—that it is easy to take it for granted.

What Finck also anticipated in his review was the debate that would arise over just how “American” Dvořák’s New World Symphony was, having been completed a mere eight months after the Czech composer landed on American soil. Before we dive into that topic, let’s retrace how Dvořák ended up in the United States in the first place. In 1885, prominent New York arts patron Jeannette Thurber established the National Conservatory of Music in the hopes of fostering an American school of composition. In June 1891, she asked Dvořák if he would move to New York City to serve as the conservatory’s director. It took some convincing, but eventually he agreed, making the long journey across the Atlantic with his family in September 1892.

Dvořák was keen to absorb the sights and sounds of his new home. When not teaching, conducting, or composing, he could often be found watching the trains coming into the city or feeding the pigeons in Central Park. A nationalist composer who had grounded his own music in Czech folk traditions, Dvořák thought Americans should draw on their own folk music—particularly that of Indigenous and African Americans—to develop a national compositional style. During his three years in the United States, he developed a fond appreciation for these musical traditions. Although any Indigenous American music he would have encountered would have been presented through a white lens, he was given a more authentic view of the Black Spiritual tradition through singer Harry T. Burleigh, a talented composition student at the conservatory who later became renowned for his Spiritual arrangements.

Statements Dvořák made to the press around the time of the symphony’s premiere—and the subtitle he appended to it (“From the New World”)—led many to falsely assume the work contained actual American folk music. He later clarified that he intended only to capture “the spirit of such American national melodies,” and that the subtitle was meant to convey “impressions and greetings from the New World,” like a musical postcard to the homeland. In truth, many of the “folk” elements of the symphony, such as pentatonic scales and dance-like themes, are found in Dvořák’s earlier compositions. As music critic Michael Steinberg succinctly puts it, “The music Dvořák found in America enriched his palette by a few shades, but confirmed more than altered who he was.”

In the first movement, a pianissimo introduction sets a melancholy atmosphere before the horn asserts itself with an E-minor vaulting arpeggio—a motto that will recur throughout the symphony. This triumphant theme alternates with two lighter melodies: a modal dance introduced by the flute and oboe, and a sunny tune with a faint resemblance to the Spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” From the first movement’s cadence in E minor, Dvořák creates an ingenious bridge to the key of D-flat major in the beginning of the Largo using seven broad chords. Now comes the famous English horn theme. While it most closely recalls a Spiritual, it was Dvořák’s own creation. (A white student at the National Conservatory later added the familiar words, “Goin’ Home,” leading some to think it was a preexisting song.)

According to the composer, the scherzo was inspired by the wedding feast scene and dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. The scherzo and the Largo may have derived from sketches for an opera based on Longfellow’s poem, which Thurber had asked Dvořák to write but never came to fruition, owing to a poor libretto. Despite this American literary influence, the musical material is the most typically Bohemian of the symphony, with the rhythm of the first theme echoing the Czech language in its emphasis on the first beat. In the finale, Dvořák introduces yet more inspired melodies, recalling themes from the previous movements in the development section before throwing everything together in a thrilling climax.

—Katherine Buzard