CENTRAL EUROPE — BETWEEN PRESENCE AND ABSENCE The Architectonics of Blur in Loos, Schoenberg, and Janác ˇek Dariusz Gafijczuk When in 1937 Elias Canetti visited Oscar Kokoschka in Prague, he came for the first time “face to face” with the Czech language. It evoked distant over- tones of the Bulgarian he had heard as a child and then had completely forgotten. One word struck him as especially uncanny, the Czech hudba, perhaps the most unmusical word for music in any language: “I was almost as attached to this word [music] as to a tangible object, but as time went on, I began to feel uneasy about it being used for every kind of music, especially as I became better acquainted with modern music.” 1 Canetti wrote to Alban Berg to say that he had discovered the right word for modern sound — hudba: “That was the word for Stravinsky’s Les Noces, for Bartók, Janác ˇek and a lot more.” 2 Berg would have none of it, even if indeed the Czech language, like modern music, is full of thrusts and strange accentuations. Canetti found himself living in their acoustic shadow, along the way losing music as his standard signifier for organized sound. Common Knowledge 19:3 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2281819 © 2013 by Duke University Press 530 Symposium: Fuzzy Studies, Part 6 1. Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, trans. Ralph Man- heim (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 316. 2. Canetti, Play of the Eyes, 316– 17.