D a s G l a s p e r l e n s p i e l

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

[duration 58:39] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"The Glass Bead Game is the last full-length novel of the German author Hermann Hesse. Also is ´a kind of synthesis of human learning´ in which themes, such as a musical phrase or a philosophical thought, are stated. As the Game progresses, associations between the themes become deeper...

´Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.´ (H.H.)

It's time to break the glass! Do we live in a while when people are still able to hear each other? And listen to themselves? How can we dismantle the pandemic triviality? I think, ladies and gentlemen, implementing - in all possible dimensions of our existence - the Depth. Learning or relearning how to listen deeply, for example. In a period of History as troubled as the current one (economic tyranny, supremacists groups, terrorism, religious extremism, environmental disasters etc.), assuredly is not random the theme chosen by O.M. Ralph Freedman wrote in his biography of Hesse that the tensions caused by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany directly contributed to the creation of the Glass Bead Game as a response to the oppressive times. ´The educational province of Castalia, which provided a setting for the novel, came to resemble Hesse's childhood Swabia physically while assuming more and more the function of his adopted home, neutral Switzerland, which in turn embodied his own antidote to the crises of his time. It became ´the island of love´ or at least ´an island of the spirit.´ Freedman opined that in the Glass Bead Game ´contemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching and Western mathematics and music fashioned the perennial conflicts of his life into a unifying design.´

Apropos, some musical references that inspired certain character in the novel are Buxtehude and Pachelbel. Anti-trivia, profound afflatus. Including Melgaço.

Otacílio Melgaço, like the Master of the / his game, throws the vibrational glass beads and our hearing is the initial move to discover how unfathomably such play [´Das Glasperlenspiel´] endlessly ends." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"INTRO - CASTALIA or PLACE YOUR BETS

1- ´Das Glasperlenspiel´ takes place at an unspecified date centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century;

2- The novel is an example of a bildungsroman. In literary criticism, a bildungsroman (German: ´novel of formation/education/culture´), novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story (though it may also be known as a subset of the coming-of-age story) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is extremely important;

3- The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.

MAGISTER LUDI or THE PLAYOFF

´A Poet is a Man who has the gift to dominate his Madness and guide her...´, once wrote another Hermann; in the case: Broch.

Guided madness, futurity, transcendence, creation, ethos, mesmerization, godsend, daemon... Sum of fragments of it all (and much more) is what we'll find in the sonic poetic hypnotic minimalist alert formative Melgacian enchantment of ´Das Glasperlenspiel´.

´Das Glasperlenspiel´, Lapis Philosophorum." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

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I - The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel) is the last full-length novel of the German author Hermann Hesse. It was begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943 after being rejected for publication in Germany due to Hesse's anti-Fascist views. A few years later, in 1946, Hesse went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In honoring him in its Award Ceremony Speech, the Swedish Academy said that the novel "occupies a special position" in Hesse's work.

"Glass Bead Game" is a literal translation of the German title, but the book has also been published under the title Magister Ludi, Latin for "Master of the Game", which is an honorific title awarded to the book's central character. "Magister Ludi" can also be seen as a pun: lud- is a Latin stem meaning both "game" and "school". However, the title Magister Ludi is misleading, as it implies the book is a straightforward bildungsroman. In reality, the book touches on many different genres, and the bulk of the story is on one level a parody of the biography genre;

II - Many characters in the novel have names that are allusive word games. For example, Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi was Thomas van der Trave, a veiled reference to Thomas Mann, who was born in Lübeck, situated on the Trave River. Knecht's brilliant but unstable friend Fritz Tegularius is based on Friedrich Nietzsche, while Father Jacobus is based on the historian Jakob Burckhardt. The name of Carlo Ferromonte is an italianized version of the name of Hesse's nephew, Karl Isenberg, while the name of the Glass Bead Game's inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, was taken from Heinrich Perrot, who owned a machine shop where Hesse once worked after dropping out of school. The name of the pedagogic province in the story is taken from Greek legend of the nymph Castalia, who was transformed into an inspiration-granting fountain by the god Apollo;

III - pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Jogo_das_Contas_de_Vidro#/media/File:Pyramid_of_35_spheres_animation.gif

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.