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The Glass Bead Game is 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 colours 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 stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.
Hermann Hesse
The Hermann Hesse Museum, in Hesse’s home town of Calw in Germany, gives no clues at all about the Glass Bead Game of his Nobel Prize-winning novel. On the contrary, the game seems to have had no physical substance or prototype, but to have been a metaphor for a pattern of associative thought, an inclination or mood that might have come over Hesse as he tossed leaves meditatively into the bonfire in autumn, as he relates in one of his poems. In the museum, there is a photograph of Hesse with a wooden solitaire board with plain pegs. The game design described here could be played on such a board, but the photograph is unlikely to represent Hesse playing anything other than solitaire.
Music is a touchstone throughout the exposition of the rules and examples in this paper. In the fictitious history of the Glass Bead Game as created by Hermann Hesse, the first games were played in the domains of mathematics and music (From acoustics to modern music). Subsequently, the medium was taken up and applied by experts to their own diverse fields of knowledge. Hesse had envisaged the development of the game as being dependent on an in-depth and comprehensive application of the medium to a succession of different subjects. As a mathematician and a musician by training, I am also inclined to build from this base (Arabic : Bach : Change), and hope that others may be sufficiently interested to apply similar principles in their own areas of expertise.
In Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game the positions, and correspondences between them, might tell us something about humanity, the world we’re living in, and the universe: something within the human mind or human condition which led to similar structures being formed, something in the world or the universe which made them necessary. This process of enlightenment, amazement and epiphany is what Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is about.
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Table of contents: Chapter 1 - Introduction; Chapter 2 - A basic form of play; Comparison; Examples of comparison; Blanks; Instantiation and generalisation; Examples of instantiation and generalisation; Combining comparison, instantiation and generalisation; Example Music and architecture; Example Music, astronomy, calendar design and politics; Example Non-western music; False moves; Subjectivity; Error; Approximation; Inappropriate application of structures from other subject domains; Chapter 3 - Representation, layout and order of play; Rhyming at the level of representation; Arabic Bach Change; Game layout; Mandala layout; Table of correspondences; Order of play; Chapter 4 - An example game; Move 1 Architecture, Astronomy Empirical observation; Move 2 Music, I Ching Empirical observation; Move 3 Astronomy, Music, Architecture, I Ching Composition of the whole; Move 4 Astronomy, Music, Architecture, I Ching Incommensurability; Move 5 Music, Architecture 3-4-5; Move 6 Astronomy, I Ching “Base 5” ; Move 7 Music, Astronomy, Architecture Works of art exhibiting epimoric ratios; Move 8 Music, I Ching Rhythm; Move 9 Music, Architecture Double rhythm; Representation of the game as a “table of correspondences” ; Game commentary; Chapter 5 - A genealogy of the Glass Bead Game; Relationship to structuralism; Relationship to cognitive anthropology; Relationship to poetry; Relationship to art; Relationship to performance; Relationship to alchemy and magic; Relationship to religion; Chapter 6 - Select bibliography; Chapter 7 Acknowledgements.
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