researches

over the last couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of research into the imaginary history of Hesse's Glass Bead Game. Basically, the roots of the game tend to be in studies or philosophies that focus on mathematics, music, art, religion and science, and especially those that focus on all at once.

"There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and the runes of Novalis’s hallucinatory visions."

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More on the history of the game:
The original Glass Bead Game was a modified abacus that was a way to play with musical notation. The wires were the bar lines and different sized beads represented different lengths of notes. The book goes on to describe how the game was translated into other fields of study, and different sets of symbols were set up to accommodate the respective fields. Then there was an effort to combine all the symbols and fields into a universal language of symbols, which resulted, eventually, in the creation of the modern Glass Bead Game, which no longer used glass beads.

The invention of the game marks the transition into a new age. The previous age was noted for it's disordered culture, and excess of shoddy art, music, information, and education. The new age renounces production of new art and instead reflects on the past and plays with it.

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I think I might start with the beginnings of the Glass Bead Game, since the end result depends on the previous steps. Some small abacus-like device that plays with music through math. Music and math are really the only fields that have their own extensive, standardized notation, therefore extending this game to other fields would be impossible anyway.

Maybe soon I'll actually try an idea.