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“Exercise is for those who can’t handle drugs and alcohol.”
-Lily Tomlin

Tomlin was right on with that one. As an artist who specializes in experimental music, I’ve seen my share of drugs. They are endemic to my profession, and people have been offering drugs to me since I was in high school. Still, though, I’ve kept them at arm’s length. I tried marijuana during my undergraduate years and I still drink a beer on occasion, but that’s it. Narcotics never interested me and although I’m fascinated by hallucinogenics I’ve never really tried them as I’m not sure how I would react and am not interested in a bad trip.

But I understand why artists use them, especially pot and hallucinogenics. It’s for the Sense of Wonder. Sci fi writers first coined that phrase and it describes that incredible feeling when your entire worldview shifts and you see and feel and think things that are entirely new. For creative people it’s a magical feeling, a drug in its own right, powerfully addictive and alluring.

Of course the main sources of my daily dose of the Sense of Wonder come from composing, practicing, listening to great music, and reading great literature, but in the past four years I’ve gradually come to realize that equally powerful for me is exercise, especially endurance sports.

Four years ago I completed my first sprint triathlon. I didn’t know what I was doing and entered it on a lark and finished third to last, but I had a lot of fun and it was more productive than my usual puttering around the gym. One thing led to another and now four years later I’m averaging about seven races a year, consistently placing in the top third or quarter, training up to 12 hours a week, and working with a team. This passion of mine has become a major lifestyle shift. Now that my body has adapted to the training and the shorter races, I’m seeking bigger and more difficult events. This coming year I’m planning to complete my first 50K trail race, as well as my first 70.3 (half Ironman) triathlon (1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run). I also have my sites set on finishing a 50-mile trail race in 2012 and then a 100-mile trail race.

2012? But isn’t it only 2010? Yes, but endurance sports take a lot of careful training to avoid injury and maximize race potential. Indeed, one of the things I like most about this is its cerebral nature. One simply can’t do enough research about training and diet and about the human body. The more one knows, the better one can train and eat and push through physical and mental walls to reach greater heights of human experience.

And that’s where things get interesting. Even as I’ve progressed beyond the beginner stages as an endurance athlete and have become more seasoned, that Sense of Wonder still kicks in, and usually when things have become difficult. When my heart is pounding, and every cell in my body is screaming at me to stop, and every other rational being in the universe would be kicking back on the couch, I’m still going, pushing through walls of pain and exhaustion. Bursting through those walls is an indescribable euphoria. Finishing a tough training day or race produces feelings of incredible power. The world literally looks different. You see your potential. You feel it. And you learn that humans are capable incredible things, way beyond what you might have imagined before you started that race several hours ago.

That is the most powerful drug I’ve found so far, much stronger than regular drugs. And at this point I’m a full on junkie. I build my days around the training–still meeting my obligations as a father, husband, and professional–but if I have to get up at 4:00 a.m. to train I do it. If I have to get my run in after the kids are asleep then I do that. Whatever it takes to get that Sense of Wonder. I think this is why my in the last few years my creative powers have opened up and my percussion playing has gotten better. As I’ve trained my body to withstand longer, more punishing events, I’m more in touch with the Sense of Wonder and my own potential. The Romantic notion of the drug-addled creative genius is false. My creative powers are within me, and I can push them out only with intense, sustained effort. No pill, plant, or drink can do that for me.

A few weeks ago I was sitting next to a friend for a performance of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Capriccio Espagnol. I love that piece. It is a successful piece on many levels and I find a lot of subtlety and nuance in the work. It is a public piece, not the same as, say, Elliott Carter’s music, but that doesn’t make it a less valuable work to me.

My friend clearly felt differently. He was visibly agitated, writhing around in his chair and muttering under his breath something about “this lousy music. . . ” I was a little annoyed at this, but willing to forgive him as he’s one of the most brilliant people I know. I know his tastes and I suspected that the public nature of the piece bothered him. Still, I couldn’t help but be taken back to my negative experience at June in Buffalo 12 years ago, in 1998.

June in Buffalo is a summer music festival that always features at least five “well-known” composers. Each of them gives a two-hour presentation throughout the five days, talking about their music. They all played some recordings, but only two of them really talked about their work. The other three spent the rest of their time complaining about Steve Reich and Philip Glass and what a horrible state classical music was in. It is etched in my mind for all time the moment one of them said that ” . . . Steve Reich and Philip Glass are ruining classical music the way Aaron Copland ruined it a generation before.” There were clearly issues of professional jealousy involved, but mostly the composers seemed bothered by the apparent lack of musical complexity in the music of Glass and Reich and others.

The problem with “musical complexity” is that it usually means various sorts of games and hidden architecture buried in the construction of a piece of music, a Glass Bead Game, if you will, played with notes and rhythms and notational devices. This approach to composing is certainly alluring for bookish intellectuals, and especially for graduate students with a lot of time on their hands, but it rarely reaches a broader audience.

And for good reason. I will shout this from the rooftops until the day I die: the most important elements of any musical composition are STORY and/or FUNCTION and/or RITUAL. Is there a story? If it doesn’t tell a story does it serve a function (e.g. dance music)? Or does it create a ritual experience? Sometimes it can be both a story and a game, as in the music of J.S. Bach, but that’s a happy coincidence of grammar and intent and genius that only happens every few hundred years. But the nature of storytelling is so hardwired into the human psyche that without it people literally can not comprehend what they’re hearing. Ritual is just as important. Rituals define us by marking off the major points in our life, moving us through liminal states to places of stability. This is why early minimalism, though so bare and uncompromising (and actually intensely modernist), gained such a big audience. Those concerts were ritual experiences, putting listeners on a journey through their psyche into new realms of being. And in that sense, the music was quite complex.

The notion of complexity goes far beyond the notes and rhythms. Music is a social activity, and one in which the production of the sounds is as important as the notes on the page. When one considers the interplay of all of those dynamics, a work like Capriccio Espagnol becomes quite complex indeed.

As my friend Caleb Burhans once so perfectly put it: “There’s a big difference between a piece of music theory, and a piece of music.” (Those two areas aren’t mutually exclusive, but that’s yet another conversation.) I’ve seen some composers labor and sweat over their composing for years and hardly write anything at all because they’re working so hard to build an elaborate piece of musical architecture, hoping it will cement their fame in the annals of music history. I imagine them sitting at their desks with a huge poster of Beethoven looming in the background. Sweat pouring down their faces, pencil in a death grip. “Must write masterpiece . . . must write masterpiece . . .” That must be a frustrating way to write music.

For the life of a composer the process is everything. You wake up, you write. If there’s a commission, you fulfill it. If not, then you design your own projects. Some pieces turn out amazing, some don’t, but you just keep writing. Sometimes you get paid, sometimes you don’t. And there are other ways to be creative, too. Maybe you curate events or teach students or play concerts, but one way or another you are actively involved in a life of creating music, not passively playing games with notes and rhythms and notation devices, hoping someone will write an article about you for a music theory journal.