Veranstaltungsort: Issue Project Room, New York City

After four and a half hours of glacial, repetitive, soporifically quiet music... the crowd goes wild! This was the scene at Issue Project Room on Sunday evening as three members from the Either/Or Ensemble concluded Morton Feldman’s monumental trio For Philip Guston.

Seven Storey Mountain, the title of Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s autobiography, is a reference to the mountain of purgatory in Dante’s Inferno. It is also, fittingly, the title of trumpeter Nate Wooley’s song cycle – meant to represent “a certain abandon found in religious practice within the confines of a composed work for instrumentalists”.

When’s the last time you were simultaneously awake and truly unaware of what time it was? You probably can’t remember, right? These days everything is time-stamped; everyone constantly checks their phone as they hurry from one task to the next.