College Professor Biking Continental Divide For The Sake Of Art

Call it performance art. To the extreme.

Payton MacDonald, a music professor at William Paterson University, will combine the two things he is most passionate about in life: creating music and ultra-distance mountain biking.

MacDonald will bike the 2,500-mile Continental Divide from Mexico to Canada for a performance art piece he calls Sonic Divide. 

MacDonald, a percussionist, has commissioned 30 original compositions from composers, including several William Paterson faculty members each time he crosses the Continental Divide. He will film and record each performance. 

MacDonald will sing and only use a pair of lightweight mallets and objects he finds on the trails to complete each piece. The recordings will be mixed and put onto an album. The music has been written with the objects and settings in mind.

MacDonald has traversed part of the divide before.

"I view this event as a metaphor of rugged American individualism, a celebration of our potential and our place in the vast cosmos."

MacDonald is filming a documentary and writing a book about the 25-day journey.

"I cannot wait to get out and perform them in some of the world’s most gorgeous natural settings," MacDonald said. 

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PHOTO: Peyton MacDonald in a video he created explaining the project. YouTube screenshot.