The Pleasures of Obscurity

Obscurity isn't invisibility; the "occult" or occluded isn't truly the hidden. It's what you can just make out, but not fully. You can tell it's there but can't quite see what it is. The obscure as an aesthetic principle has interested me for a long time.

My introduction to the obscure was a remark by Luciano Berio about his wonderful Sinfonia. I can't lay my hand on the quote now so I'm probably misremembering it but it was to the effect that he wanted the listener to be constantly not-quite-catching what the many voices in the piece were saying or singing, as if you can the tail end of one thing but then lose the thread of another, as if too many things are going on at once to be able to understand any one of them:

Spoken words you can't quite hear are a great material for music. Another is words you can't understand; the three pieces that make up John Zorn's New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands use "the spoken languages of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese as pure melody" (source) and I'm sure they hit very differently if you understand what's being said (I don't and I adore these pieces):

I guess the exact halfway point between Berio and Zorn is Ground Zero's exhilarating collage "Red Mao Book By Sony":

One of the things that I love about the alchemists and magicians of the early modern world is their use of obscurity: symbols and jargon that were recognisably occult but whose meanings were hard to make out. Reading Dee or Agrippa is like reading a science textbook at a level far above what you can understand, except it's mostly like that for everyone; there's no university course you can take that will make it all clear. Although there's plenty to learn about and understand, in the end it's not science, it's mystery.

And while making music is about responding to our material conditions and communicating to an audience (real or imaginary) it's also about mystery. It shows itself of course, art always puts on a show, but it also hides the main thing behind its back. Otherwise it would just be a lecture or demonstration. This is perhaps why we hate talking about what we do -- it's not that we're inarticulate without our instruments; nor are we hiding the fact that "the emperor has no clothes", as people love to comment on videos of modernist music for some reason. It's that we can't give away what happens in the Sanctuary of Eleusis. Partly because we don't entirely understand it ourselves.

Would Cy Twombly's untitled painting be better if we know what the scratchy writing said? Is it even writing? Did Twombly even know? Doesn't the effect of the painting largely take place in the hollow space where the answers to those questions would go?