Complexity

I was reading a little piece in the NY Times about an opera based on the life of Walter Benjamin, a "secular messiah." There's a discussion about "difficult music," about a "difficult subject," etc. Then there's this: "Yet more seems to be at stake than keeping an audience challenged...Theodor Adorno defended difficult music as having its own social value precisely because it teaches us how to withhold understanding and therefore helps us to resist the allure of false clarity in the world beyond the concert hall. Complexity in other words, is a worthy ideal in art because reality is even more complex and dissonant than the thorniest work of modernism, even if politicians and the commercial culture reassure us that everything is simple, clear and harmonius." This seems to me to be exactly right. I am a student of the "school of clarity," but all the lessons come from a deep and humbling complexity. The motto here: "Complexity will set you free!"