Hedonic Treadmill
Duration - 10:00
Instrumentation - flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass

"While happiness, as a state of subjective pleasure, may be the highest good, it seems to be distressingly transient. Even as we contemplate our satisfaction with a given accomplishment, the satisfaction fades, to be replaced finally by a new indifference and a new level of striving... As the environment becomes more pleasurable, subjective standards for gauging pleasurableness will rise, centering the neutral point of the pleasure-pain, success-failure continuum at a new level such that once again as many inputs are experienced as painful as are pleasurable."

-Phillip Brickman And Donald T. Campbell, "Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society"

My goal in the early stages of this piece was to write a bit of purely abstract music with a more predominant pitch center than usual, using only my intuition to guide me forward—a departure from my standard practice of skeptical use of pitched material and structural preplanning. However, it soon became apparent to me that my intuition seems to require an endless overcoming of material to reach a new level of energy: one pleasure must be replaced by an even greater pleasure, an ultimately unsustainable endless pursuit of growth (perhaps this
piece could be given a turgid economically-themed title).

In other words, my ego has crept back into the picture. On some level, in this piece I am trying to escape myself, located musically in the piece as a persistent high B which drives the music ceaselessly forward until it can go no further. After this, a sort of dissolution takes place as a prospective answer to the question of escaping myself is posed. Brickman and Campbell suggest that successive stages of the hedonic treadmill continually revert us to a "default state" of equal pleasure and equal suffering... but what if the balance of this default state is
actually tilted toward suffering? What if equilibrium is habitually negative? In this case, the desire for the ego to dissolve, and subsequently the desiring of the subjective experience of stepping off the hedonic treadmill, becomes urgent.