The Said Symphony: moves 1-5

Move content:

Hermann Hesse’s novel Das Glasperlenspiel (English title The Glass Bead Game, also published as Magister Ludi) won him the Nobel for Literature.

The centerpiece of the novel is the Game itself. Hesse doesn’t spell out in detail how it is to be played, but his hints are enough to let us know that in play, different ideas from across world culture are combined as if in a virtual music of ideas:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.

It is in an attempt to bring Hesse’s idea of a musical synthesis of ideas into practical application in helping us understand — and perhaps even, god willing, help us to resolve — the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that I am playing this game.

The idea is not to come up with a solution, but a richer sense of the interplay of motives and memories as they build the situation we all now face.

Link claimed:

To Edward Said, in that Hesse immediately precedes Said in his intuition that melodies are not the only kinds of thought that can be juxtaposed in counterpoint and thus integrated in a complex, sometimes tragic, often profound, always human music.

Comment:

The graphic I have used is from the cover of a lovely CD, featuring Arturo Delmoni and Nathaniel Rosen, Music for a Glass Bead Game. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 3: Move 3: JS Bach and the Art of Fugue

Move content:

Bach was my first great love in the arts, and when I applied to study at Christ Church, Oxford, it was essays on Hopkins, El Greco, and Bach — specifically the B Minor Mass — that got me in the door. Years later, when I lived in Warrenton and commuted to a think-tank job in Arlington, VA, I found myself muttering To hold the Mind of Bach over and over to myself like a mantram.

And that, I think, is the key to my games.

Page 2 of 5 | Previous page | Next page