Writer’s block and boredom were the inspiration behind works presented at University Settlement on the Lower East Side by the new-music ensemble Either/Or. The good news: Anthony Coleman had managed to finish the score to his “Flaubert/Sofa/Sentence” ahead of time, and Giorgi Janiashvili’s “Muffling Fog: After Martin Heidegger” was only intermittently dull. A performance that includes an on-screen, nude Hitler salute by one of the composers can be called many things, but not boring. For the most part, the evening felt like a protracted fit of artistic petulance and self-indulgence.
First up on Wednesday was Mr. Janiashvili’s 45-minute piece for piano, electronics and video in which recorded noises — a collection of hissing, crackling and gurgling sounds that alternated with live piano — were often delivered at earsplitting volume. Those interludes, delivered with impeccable precision and balance by the pianist Taka Kigawa, began with widening circles of repeated patterns in one hand interrupted by crisp exclamations in the other; eventually the music softened into an Impressionistic mode. Grainy video segments showed the composer in various poses of indolence. In one blurry scene, he was naked in a bathroom crouched over, then snapping to attention with his right arm raised in a Nazi salute.
“Muffling Fog” takes its name from a lecture Heidegger delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1929, in which he said that profound boredom “removes all things and human beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable indifference” to the point where, out of the haze, “being as a whole” can become manifest. Mr. Janiashvili’s Nazi gesture was no doubt intended as a comment on Heidegger’s membership in that party and his anti-Semitic leanings. But his pretentious and grating work brought me no closer to grasping either Heidegger or “being as a whole.”
Mr. Coleman’s “Flaubert/Sofa/Sentence” for alto saxophone (Geoff Landman), percussion (David Shively) and the composer on Korg synthesizer was a similarly overreaching attempt to gain intellectual capital by association, this time with the great 19th-century novelist Gustave Flaubert. Mr. Coleman’s inspiration was a letter in which Flaubert complained that “when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride which makes me pant after a chimera.”
In this piece, synthesizer and saxophone create piercing dissonances that are sustained to the point where sonic boundaries blur, throb and flicker. As a musical approximation of self-hatred and “demented pride,” it was reasonably effective. But Flaubert wrote that letter in 1852, when he was at work on “Madame Bovary.” His despair was the byproduct of a creative process that led to one of the most exquisite works of literature. For Mr. Coleman, it appeared to suffice as the “Thingness” itself, to borrow a word from his own program notes.
There was a half-baked experimental feel to Mr. Coleman’s “I almost got it right” and “Where’s the Machine” for trumpet (Alexandria Smith), percussion and piano, two movements from a work provisionally titled “Scenes from a teleological sickbed.” At least these short pieces traversed different moods with Ms. Smith producing an appealingly melancholic sound as well as an entertaining array of distortion effects. In Mr. Coleman’s “Metonymies of Pastness” for solo piano the music alternated between brooding darkness, chirpy clarity and an iridescent harmonic mist.
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