Venue: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

The Mother of Us All isn’t an easy work and it’s far from one of Stein’s best pieces of writing. But in this centenary of women’s suffrage, it’s an important one.

On a program of musical works with imagery ranging from Mount Fuji to zygotes, the common thread was Japan and the sounds it has inspired over the past few decades.

On Thursday night, I left a concert longing for a tranquilizer, but at Saturday night’s Man Forever/Sō Percussion concert, I began wishing for sedatives about three minutes into the first set. Before the performance, the audience sat entranced by a subtle humming drifting through the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.