Update Title: 4CC2180E-6EE1-4252-AA40-056689327959

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n 1943, the German novelist and philosopher Hermann Hesse completed his last and (excepting NARCISSUS AND GOLDMUND) greatest novel, DAS GLASPERLENSPIEL. Winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature, this book, the sum and summit of Hesse+s thought and one of the most truly relevant books of the era, was translated into English in 1969 and brought out first with the title THE GLASS BEAD GAME and subsequently as MAGISTER LUDI (Master of the Game).To understand the imaginary (and not-so-imaginary) world which Hesse creates, a world which really permeates all his novels, it is helpful to know a little about his life. Born in Calw near the Black Forest in 1877, Hesse underwent a personal crisis which turned him away from the religious life intended for him by his family. In his novels, he explores the conflict between the attainment of monastic serenity that draws some people into a blissful life of ordered thought and behavior and the doubts and psychological undercurrents that draw others to a lonely search for meaning in life, into flight and wandering. Shakespeare set the theme as a contrast between the urban and the pastoral; like Shakespeare, Hesse concludes that the best life will blend both the mental and the physical, the flesh and the spirit, but that the balance is not easy to find. It is in fact only in the search for that balance that there is meaning in life.

In THE GLASS BEAD GAME the "ideal" world is Castalia, a closed society of scholars who devote their energies solely to the development of the mind and the attainment of mental perfection. "The Glass Bead Game" itself is a highly difficult exercise in construction and solution of ingenious musical and mathematical complexities. Through the game the most gifted players achieve a trance like feeling of self-completion. But what is significant is that the Game uses only already-known knowledge - fugues by Bach, fragments of Leibniz, Gabrieli sonatas. Nothing new is created; perfection is attained through a complete consumption and exhaustive analysis only of the fruits of the past. Such a society, says Hesse, no matter how elite, how intellectual, how esoteric, must stagnate, wither and die.

Claude Baker is saying much the same thing in his three movement musical piece based on THE GLASS BEAD GAME. The work is far more than a programmatic reflection of Hesse+s novel; it is remarkably like the novel, a philosophical mirror as well, in which Baker utilizes Hesse+s methods and imagery to comment on artistic and social values of the twentieth century.

Like Hesse, Baker begins his work in the "Age of Feuilleton", a period of "art for art+s sake" trendiness in which knowledge of minutiae was an end in itself, and the general public delighted in trivial matters which found their way into daily newspapers, "were produced by the millions and were a major source of mental Pablum for the reader in want of culture/" These amusing anecdotal articles ("Friedrich Nietzsche and Women+s Fashions of 1870"), popular crossword puzzles and the like defined an age which was, to be sure, "by no means uncultured; it was not even intellectually impoverished. But...that age appears to have had only the dimmest notion of what to do with culture." In the first movement, Baker thus depicts the age with a canon that is serially organized and given to twenty four solo strings. The four part perpetual canon, although meant as a serious piece, is also intended to demonstrate the expressive limitations of the serial compositions of the 1950s and 1960s which Baker believes to have been too limited in emotional range. The canon is also an expression of the intense preoccupation of the Age of the Feuilleton with numerology, a preoccupation that would become a religion in the new order of Castalia. The numbers six and four are the numerological basis of the canon. It uses twenty four (six times four) strings, is stated four times with exactly sixty six notes in each statement

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