Metaphysical Mirroring: The Musical Structure of Society in

Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse’s Das

Glasperlenspiel

Shelley Hay

German Studies Review, Volume 41, Number 1, February 2018, pp. 1-17 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2018.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/687357

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 Metaphysical Mirroring:
The Musical Structure of Society
in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus
and Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel
Shelley Hay

ABSTRACT

Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel are
novels in which music clearly plays a significant role. This article explores the
ways these two authors use analogies to dodecaphonic and baroque music in
order to engage with an early German romantic ideal first expressed by Novalis,
i.e., the idea that music, language, nature, and mathematics are autonomous
systems which should, in a perfect world, mirror each other.

From Faustian characters to opinionated narrators, degenerate societies, and poly-

phonic storylines, many critics have explored the thematic and structural similarities
between Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel (Magister Ludi, 1943) and Thomas
Mann’s Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus, 1947). Indeed, the authors themselves
recognized and commented on the many ways the two novels resemble each other,
with Mann going so far as to call his masterpiece a “glass bead game with black beads”
in the handwritten dedication of the copy he sent to Hermann Hesse in 1948.1 While
a great deal of scholarship has commented on and sought to understand the numer-
ous parallels between the stories of Josef Knecht and Adrian Leverkühn, Theodore
Ziolkowski claims that “the possibilities of comparison have by no means been
exhausted by scholarship.”2 This article intends to examine one of these possibilities,
focusing on the previously underexplored relationship between music and language
presented through musical analogies in these two works of fiction.
There are, of course, various ways for music and language to intersect. One often
begins by thinking about how music can make a text more meaningful or vice versa.

German Studies Review 41.1 (2018): 1–17 © 2018 by The German Studies Association.
2 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

Studying romantic Lieder, Wagnerian opera, or even modern day pop songs all fall
within this broad category. Somewhat less common is the exploration of the ways
that authors write about music. This area of study can be divided into roughly three
categories. First, there are those passages in works of literature in which an author
or one of his characters reflects on music in general or directly describes a listening
experience, such as when Serenus Zeitblom shares his detailed impressions of one of
Leverkühn’s compositions with the reader.3 Second, some writers and philosophers
use analogies or parallels to music to help elucidate enigmatic claims or explain
difficult theoretical concepts.4 Third, there are those exceptional instances when an
author expresses the desire to mysteriously create music with words. In these cases,
the writer may base the organization of his or her literary work on some well-known
musical structure such as the sonata form, a phenomenon which musicologist Siglind
Bruhn refers to as transmedialization.5
Academic scholarship which focuses on the role of music in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century German literature has often favored examining the first and third
of these connections while neglecting the second. Das Glasperlenspiel and Doktor
Faustus are no exceptions to this general trend.6 By way of partial explanation, it is
all too easy to regard an analogy to music within a text as a mere stylistic device,
meriting less attention because of its apparent straightforwardness. However, it is
precisely these musical comparisons in Mann’s and Hesse’s masterpieces that offer
solutions to a number of unresolved questions and mysteries associated with these
two distinguished texts and their roles within literary history.
To fully appreciate the significance of musical analogies in works of fiction, one
must first examine the historical relationship between music and language. Poets and
philosophers have been contemplating the connection between these two fields for
centuries, and a number of contemporary scholars have provided detailed accounts
on the subject. Renowned musicologist Carl Dahlhaus points out in his Die Idee der
absoluten Musik (The Idea of Absolute Music) that Plato, for example, believed that
harmony, rhythm, and words are all required components of music.7 The occurrence
of all three elements together was so essential that music without language was
considered deficient.8 This view continued to predominate throughout the next two
thousand years. John Neubauer notes in his book The Emancipation of Music from
Language, for instance, that the medieval Christian church considered music without
“verbal control” dangerous throughout the Middle Ages, and that secular factions
began a similar campaign against the “musical obfuscation of the text” by the end of
the sixteenth century.9 It was not until the late eighteenth century that this notion
of music as secondary to language began to change.
Coinciding with well-known social, political, and philosophical changes such
as the French Revolution and the birth of Kantian philosophy, the end of the eigh-
teenth century also saw a shift in aesthetic theory, described most persuasively by
 Shelley Hay 3

M.H. Abrams in his The Mirror and the Lamp.10 Abrams acknowledges a move away
from viewing art simply as an imitation of nature to something that is natural in
itself. Moreover, he describes a new emphasis placed on the relationship between the
artist and the artwork, rather than the work of art and the world. In other words, art
becomes a way of organically expressing the interior, subjective nature of the artist.
In the realm of literature, this shift first led to an appraisal of music above other arts
by authors themselves because music appeared best to fulfill this new requirement
of expressing the inner nature or feelings of the artist. Unlike language, music was
deemed fundamentally nonrepresentational in nature and therefore not bound to
empirical reality in any direct manner.11 Naturally, this new appreciation of music
caused a shift in the relationship between it and language. As Neubauer notes, “from
the Romantic era onward, the relation between music and language reverses itself, all
arts aspire . . . to the condition of music.”12 However, Neubauer is not just referring
to any music in these passages, but rather to instrumental music of the time, or what
in certain contexts is referred to as “absolute music.”
Although first coined in the second half of the nineteenth century by Richard
Wagner, the idea of absolute music—a pure, instrumental music emancipated from
language, which allows one to mysteriously speak the unspeakable—began to develop
some fifty years earlier with early German romantic writers.13 Post-Kantian authors
such as Friedrich Schlegel or Novalis faced a type of linguistic crisis, in that they felt
language was not capable of expressing the hidden or “true” nature of reality, and
turned, in part, to contemplating music as a possible solution to this general dilemma.14
Novalis identified the main problem as a general misunderstanding of how language
becomes meaningful. Anticipating Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic theory, Novalis
claimed that one must first let go of the idea that words directly represent things in the
world.15 He uses references to music to overcome this common prejudice of the time
and to describe his theory of linguistic meaning. His comparisons between the two
disciplines occur on a number of different levels, the first being in how their respective
materials relate to each other, for example, how musical notes and words are similar.
Novalis asks his reader: “Does language not have its soprano and bass and tenor tones?
Its beat—its key note—its diverse voices and speeds? Are the different types of styles
not different instruments?”16 Novalis notes a number of common features between
music and language in this one small fragment alone. Most important is the claim
that language, just like music, can be divided into different voices. He points to the
idea that notes and words relate to each other in constellations such as chords or
sentences. This attribute, rather than a direct correspondence between words and
objects in the empirical world, is what gives both music and language meaning. That
is to say, “the primary value of words lies not in their so-called vertical, semantic-
referential dimension, but in their horizontal, syntactic combination.”17 Meaning is
created through context.
4 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

Novalis also focuses on the process of writing and composing. He argues that
the procedure for creating a work of literary fiction should not differ from the one
used to compose a piece of music.18 Both the author and composer are constrained
by constructs such as rules of grammar or compositional techniques, but both suc-
cessfully play within these boundaries to create something meaningful.19 The notion
of play is absolutely essential to Novalis’s theory of language and is one of the main
focal points in Novalis’s “Monolog.” Here he explains: “proper conversation is merely
a word game . . . when someone speaks merely for the sake of speaking, he utters
the most splendid, most original truths. But if he wants to speak about something
definite, capricious language makes him say the most ridiculous and confused stuff.”20
According to Novalis, it is only the unintentional, playful combination of words that
creates actual meaning. Although counterintuitive within a linguistic framework,
drawing another parallel to music allows one to better comprehend Novalis’s message.
The key to these claims is musical improvisation. Much as an improvising musician
feels compelled or encouraged to play a certain succession of notes without giving
the result much rational thought—naturally, within a specific framework such as a
musical key—so too should the poet simply let the words flow from his pen when
writing. He should let only an impulse to write guide his play with words.21
“Monolog” then describes how this playful, ideal form of writing relates to the
empirical world. In a frequently quoted passage, in which the reference to music
follows shortly thereafter and can be included in the comparison, the author explains:
“If one could only make people understand that it is the same with language as with
mathematical formulae. These constitute a world of their own. They play only with
themselves, express nothing but their own marvelous nature, and just for this reason
they are so expressive—just for this reason the strange play of relations between things
is mirrored in them.”22 Language, music, and mathematical formulas are meaning-
ful because they are systems of signs. As previously mentioned, it is the relationship
between the signs, for example, musical notes or variables in a formula, which give
music and math meaning. In language, it is not the relationship between the signifier
and signified which makes language meaningful, but the relationship between the
signifiers themselves. Language represents empirical reality indirectly. The system
that is language (with rules of grammar) “mirrors” the system of the world (with its
natural laws). Similarly, the rules guiding musical creation and the laws governing
mathematics build unique systems that “mirror” each other, as well as language and
the natural world. They are each autonomous, self-referential systems that reflect
each other in basic structure rather than material.23 For Novalis, all meaning lies in
the way that things relate to each other.
Finally, Novalis explains what the result of ideal poetry will be. When language
can play with its material more like instrumental music does, then it will better be
able to reflect the true nature of reality. He goes so far as to announce the coming
 Shelley Hay 5

of a golden age: “Das wird die goldne Zeit sein, wenn alle Worte—Figurenworte—
Mythen—und alle Figuren—Sprachfiguren—Hieroglyphen sein werden—wenn
man Figuren sprechen und schreiben—und Worte vollkommen plastisieren, und
musizieren lernt.”24 (“That will be a Golden Age, when all words become—figurative
words—myths—And all figures become—linguistic figures—hieroglyphs—When
we learn to speak and write figures—and learn to perfectly sculpt and make music
with words.”)25 Adding a performative dimension to this fragment, Novalis offers
an example of his ideal language. Playing with the word Figuren (figures), he also
writes of Figurenworte (figurative words) and Sprachfiguren (linguistic figures). He
plays with the word figure and places it in different figurations with words referring
to language, thereby altering the meaning of each of the linguistic elements. He
forces the reader to relate each of his words to each other rather than objects or
ideas in the empirical world by calling attention to their similarities and differences.
Furthermore, he puts them in direct relation to “myths” and “hieroglyphs,” implying
that there is a hidden meaning beyond the obvious empirical connections waiting to
be discovered. This brings one back full circle to the idea of the absolute in music
and literature. By correctly representing the relationship between objects or ideas in
the phenomenal world, one somehow transcends empirical reality. The teacher in
Novalis’s Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Novices of Sais) explains it best: “He who speaks
true, is full of eternal life, his written word seems wondrously akin to the mysteries,
for it is a chord taken from the symphony of the universe.”26 In Novalis’s utopian
vision of the future, writers will compose and make music with words. Guided by an
unintentional force that appears to randomly associate words with other words, they
will improvise with language, they will express the ineffable, and they will ultimately
access a transcendental truth or reality.27
Influenced to varying degrees along the way by more pessimistically inclined think-
ers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, who participated in the elevation of music above
other art forms while discrediting any possible transformation of language into music
or attainment of paradise, or Friedrich Nietzsche, whose early attitude toward music
can be described as a sort of romantic optimism combined with Schopenhauerian aes-
thetics, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann clearly participated in this long romantic
tradition both directly (in the case of Hesse) and indirectly via the Schopenhauer-
Nietzsche trajectory (in the case of Mann).28 Both the musical contents as well as the
musical structures of Das Glasperlenspiel and Doktor Faustus have been thoroughly
explored by academic scholarship and attest to the common heritage of both novels
in early German romanticism. And while scholars have certainly commented on the
many ways that Novalis’s works have influenced Hermann Hesse, they do not place
their analyses within a context specific to the young poet’s aforementioned theories
on language and music, although Mann and Hesse engage with many of these ideas.29
Specifically, both authors support the idea that music, language, and the phenomenal
6 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

world should function as autonomous systems of signs that mirror each other. They
employ hitherto understudied analogies to music—recall the previously mentioned
division of music-language studies in literature into the three broad categories of con-
tent, analogy, and structure—to reflect the hidden structures of the societies that they
write about. One can view each of these societies, Castalia and early fascist Germany,
as independent microcosms of phenomenal reality, i.e., each of them as a version of
the self-referential empirical world Novalis references whenever he discusses nature.
Now if one were to suppose that Mann and Hesse successfully implemented
Novalis’s requirements for a truly self-referential language by writing novels themati-
cally and structurally based on musical ideas, where is Novalis’s romantic golden age?
Why does Hesse participate in this long literary tradition of writing absolute music,
but deny doing so at times?30 Why are connections between Thomas Mann and early
German romanticism sometimes made so tentatively or with qualification in academic
scholarship?31 And if not the authors themselves, then why do their characters not
eventually achieve some sort of enlightenment or transcendental truth at the end
of the novels? Why do Adrian Leverkühn and Josef Knecht both die without having
gained access to the absolute? In other words, what exactly happens to Novalis’s
utopian vision in the middle of the twentieth century?
Of course, the obvious answer is World War II and the Holocaust. While these
events undeniably play an essential role in the genesis and content of both novels,
merely declaring Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party to blame seems overly simplistic.
This is what was going on while Mann and Hesse were writing, but the why or how of
the matter remains unclear. In other words, why exactly does the violence of this time
period make it impossible to transcend empirical boundaries and access an absolute
truth through music in literature? I argue that the answer to this question can be found
in the analogies to music—baroque and dodecaphonic music specifically—found in
the two novels.
One element that must be brought to the forefront of a discussion on how Hesse
and Mann use comparisons to music to comment on social structures is the balance
between freedom and limitation inherent to both society and music. Theodor Adorno
makes a case for there being various dichotomies at play in the history and evolution
of music in his Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of Modern Music), arguing
for a dialectic between the objective and subjective in music, with different time
periods and musical styles emphasizing one over the other.32 For the purposes of this
investigation, I would like to frame his far more intricate and substantial theory as a
battle between compositional rules or conventions and the creative freedom of artistic
genius. That is to say, there exists a conflict when composers try to bring the feeling,
passionate, sensual, and transcendental qualities we often associate with music into
a prescribed and organized system of rules.33 It requires no great leap to postulate
a similar tension in the structure of society, particularly given Adorno’s interests in
 Shelley Hay 7

culture and politics. Governments can be seen as continuously attempting to balance

the freedom of the individual with the legal restrictions required for society to func-
tion. And just as is the case with music, emphasis is placed either more on individual
rights or collective laws throughout the evolution of a particular society.
Doktor Faustus offers the reader a prime example of Adorno’s dialectical pendulum
swinging first in one, then in the other direction.34 Portraying music history much
as the Frankfurt School philosopher himself does, Mann’s novel depicts Beethoven
as the first classical composer to stretch harmonic limits in order to add subjective
meaning to antiquated harmonic conventions. Harmonic boundaries were eventually
pushed to the extreme and resulted in the atonal music of the early twentieth century.
Leverkühn, however, finds this new music problematic. He explains to Zeitblom,
“freedom is of course another word for subjectivity, and some fine day she does not
hold out any longer, some time or other she despairs of the possibility of being creative
out of herself and seeks shelter and security in the objective. Freedom always inclines
to dialectical reversals” (193). Too much freedom leaves no way to express anything
at all. According to Adorno, this completely free, atonal music, “begins to circle
aimlessly, imprisoned within itself, released from every element of resistance, upon
whose permeation it was solely dependent for its meaning.”35 Hinted at in Novalis’s
fragments already, Adorno clarifies how music becomes meaningless if there are no
rules by which to organize the material. Leverkühn’s subsequent turn to dodecaphonic
music—highly structured and systematic compositions, which derive almost entirely
from a particular row determined before composing actually begins—follows the
dialectical pattern Adorno recognized. Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique
(invented by Leverkühn in Mann’s fictional work) is the epitome of the objective in
music.36 Furthermore, this “method of composing with twelve tones which are related
only with one another” would appear to be at first glance to be the compositional
style best suited to accessing Novalis’s absolute or transcendental reality given its
extremely self-referential nature.37 It should mirror the relationships between things
in the empirical world, or as Thomas Mann puts it himself in Die Entstehung des
Doktor Faustus (The Story of a Novel. The Genesis of Doctor Faustus), music is “only
foreground and representation, only a paradigm for something more general, only
a means to express the situation of art in general, of culture, even of man and the
intellect itself in our so critical era.”38
The parallels between dodecaphony and the society Leverkühn and Zeitblom
were living in have not been overlooked by scholars, although there is some dispute
regarding the degree to which serial compositions function as analogies to Germany in
the 1920s and 1930s, as well as regarding the relevance of this connection. Neverthe-
less, most acknowledge that there are indeed correspondences between twelve-tone
music and the ill-fated democracy of the Weimar Republic. For instance, just as one
tends to think of a democratic society as a group of citizens with individual rights
8 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

and freedoms—each person existing in the collective, yet simultaneously remaining

equal and autonomous—twelve-tone music initially appears to mimic this balance.
The frequently occurring dissonances in serial music—which result from allowing
each note in the row equal weight, as well as from the contrapuntal compositional
technique at the heart of this music—reflect, to use Evelyn Cobley’s terms, the
“plurality” and simultaneous “singularity” of an ideal democratic society.39 In other
words, just as each citizen in a functioning democracy is both an individual as well as
a member of the group, each note in a serial composition can be heard independently
of the others even when part of a chord. Whereas tones in the conventional harmonic
triads of past music blended together and, according to Adorno, promoted a deceptive
unity, modern music’s dissonant chords allows one to hear each individual note and
is therefore more “rational” and more truthful.40 In many ways, twelve-tone music’s
dissonances best represent the relationship between an individual and the rest of
society in a model democracy.
However, these democratic ideals of individuality and freedom are illusionary
in both Leverkühn’s music as well as late Weimar society. Citizens of the Weimar
Republic were not truly autonomous, just as the notes in Leverkühn’s chords are not
free. Instead, the row dictates nearly everything in modern twelve-tone music. Dis-
sonant chords are not a result of notes freely choosing to retain their individuality, but
are a result of a completely totalizing system in which many compositional decisions
are made before composing even begins.41 In the same way, people in Germany in
the first part of the twentieth century were not really free and independent as they
may have liked to believe, but were actually being manipulated and controlled by
a political party, which would transform the Weimar Republic into the totalitarian
system linked to national socialism and Hitler’s Third Reich.
Evelyn Cobley notices this connection, but simply writes of “associating” dodeca­
phonic music and fascism.42 As previously cited, Thomas Mann himself only talks
about “expressing” the spirit of a culture. Adorno rejects that artists “imitate” society,
while renowned Thomas Mann scholar Hans Rudolf Vaget dismisses any “symbolic
equivalent” and writes merely of the climate at the time “anticipating” both the music
and fascist society.43 Despite questioning the strength and significance of the parallels
between twelve-tone music and fascist society, what these claims all have in com-
mon is the unspoken determination that Adorno’s Marxist inclinations and views on
music influenced Mann. The comments all presuppose a belief in the substructure
informing the superstructure and can be summarized under the following common
denominator: one particular consequence of early twentieth-century capitalism in
Europe happened to be both fascist politics and twelve-tone music.
However, Vaget also points out elsewhere that Adorno’s influence on Mann may
not have been quite as ubiquitous as often assumed, thus encouraging one to approach
the text in fresh ways and place it in within new contexts.44 So, let us suppose for a
 Shelley Hay 9

moment that a romantic mirroring (of the kind Novalis envisioned 150 years earlier)
occurs between the music and the society described in Doktor Faustus. Rather than
framing the discussion around terms like the “material conditions of society,” “exploi-
tation,” and “alienation,” and debating whether Mann completely shared Adorno’s
Marxist beliefs or not, let us simply focus for the moment on an inspired author who
writes a story in which the structure of the novel, the type of music being described
in it, and the empirical reality the characters find themselves in, all flawlessly reflect
each other. The material of the book (language), the material of the music (tones),
and the material of society (people) all relate to each other in the same ways. In this
context, Mann successfully uses the characteristics of twelve-tone music to portray
the deception and illusion inherent to the democracy of the latter years of the Weimar
Republic. The false freedom more easily identified in dodecaphonic music echoes the
false autonomy of individuals living in this particular society. Both under the guise of
independence, an exceptionally objective music and a society increasingly controlled
by fascist forces perfectly imitate each other. By mirroring the relationships between
elements in enclosed systems, Mann’s Doktor Faustus has arguably fulfilled Novalis’s
requirements for a work of literature capable of transcending empirical boundaries.
Returning briefly to Adorno, the philosopher interestingly points out that people
living in an emerging fascist Germany do not actually feel an affinity for the music that
mirrors their existence. Although “genuine emotions of the unconscious—of shock,
of trauma—are registered without disguise through the medium of music,” denial
runs deep and citizens of the Weimar Republic are attracted to more conventional
forms of music from the past—thus lying to themselves on a second level by avoiding
both the empirical as well as emotional truths of their situation.45 While Adorno’s
observation is wrapped in a forceful critique of capitalist culture, the general theme
of denial not only resonates within Mann’s novel, but it echoes the conditions in
Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel even more accurately.
Hesse’s masterpiece is the fictional biography of Josef Knecht, a man who lived in
the Province of Castalia during the twenty-third century. Although this setting takes
the protagonist well beyond the borders of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich,
the twenty-fifth–century narrator of the novel frequently remarks on the degenerate
nature of German society at this time in history.46 More interesting than this outright
critique of twentieth-century society, however, is the more subtle commentary on the
“contemporary” hierarchical Order of Castalia—a society of intellectuals who spend
a great deal of time creating glass bead games, and who find themselves especially
attracted to musical forms from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As was
the case with Mann’s novel, examining the music Castalians prefer in more detail
also provides deeper insight into the societal structure of the fictitious community.
It is much easier and less controversial to track Hesse’s literary influences directly
back to authors such as Novalis.47 Indeed, the very essence of Castalia’s glass bead
10 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

game is a kind of “symphilosophieren,” which was so admired by early German

romantics.48 Furthermore, evidence of a struggle with the limitations of language
can be found in various forms throughout Hesse’s works.49 Just as his nineteenth-
century predecessors turned to writing about music to express what language could
not about empirical reality, Hesse uses analogies to baroque music to better articulate
the problems associated with Castalia’s well-organized order of intellectuals.
On first contact with a representative from the Province who has come to interview
him as a potential candidate for acceptance into the order, music immediately gives
a young Josef Knecht insight into the mysteries of Castalian society. While listening
to the Music Master play a baroque fugue on the piano—an exceedingly rule-driven,
organized, compositional technique—the youth sees “the whole cosmos guided,
ordered, and interpreted by the spirit of music” (43). Knecht intuitively recognizes
this music as a way of organizing and understanding reality. But music is even more
than a lens through which to view the world. Instead, as Knecht already senses dur-
ing his first encounter, phenomenal reality (and more specifically, Castalian society
as a microcosm of this reality) is influenced, directed, and shaped by this organized
music.50 Music actively determines the world around Knecht.51 It is this highly struc-
tured music of the past that acts as a model and mirror for the decidedly hierarchical
order of the future.
Alluding once again to Adorno’s philosophy of modern music and its connection
to society, the constant battle between freedom and limitation inherent to music
is analogous to the individual’s struggles within this social system.52 Knecht senses
the existence of two poles within music early on, but does not feel burdened by this
opposition until fully entering a society based on the same organizational principles.53
While the Music Master spends a great deal of time trying to convince Knecht of
the freedom one finds within self-imposed limits—explaining how each member of
the order eventually “finds his way to the place [in the hierarchy] in which he can
serve, and in serving be free” (61–62)—Knecht nevertheless struggles throughout his
life to achieve the ideal balance between an individual’s personal freedom and his
duty to the hierarchy.54 This particular justification for Castalia’s strict hierarchical
system, the sacrifice to personal freedom it requires, and its intense focus on the
objective in music, closely resembles Leverkühn’s comments regarding twelve-tone
music.55 Moreover, just as serial music has been shown to mirror a decadent society
steeped in illusion and denial whose citizens have unwittingly begun sacrificing their
autonomy to a degenerate political party in Mann’s Doktor Faustus, the emphasis
on highly organized baroque music and its similar reliance on counterpoint in Das
Glasperlenspiel reflects a society with comparable deficiencies and inherent contra-
dictions. Although the order prides itself on having evolved beyond the chaos and
destruction of the twentieth century, the members live in their own uniquely unbal-
anced society—Castalians are an elite people who place an excessive emphasis on
 Shelley Hay 11

rules, they listen to music and incorporate it into glass bead games, but no one actually
composes music, the writing of poetry is banned, and most other forms of imaginative
production are discouraged.56 While the glass bead game is a kind of ideal, universal
language with the potential to reflect the relationships between objects in empirical
reality and various disciplines such as math or music simultaneously—perhaps going
beyond what Novalis even imagined in many of his writings—the game creators limit
the art and knowledge they incorporate into games, and they completely reject the
unintentional, improvisational, inspired force behind creation that Novalis believed
allows one to transcend phenomenal boundaries. Castalia’s obsession with baroque
music, as well as the way they incorporate this music into glass bead games, reflects
the society in which Knecht lives—a one-sided, deficient society, which privileges
the objective over the subjective, yet does not openly acknowledge doing so. The bal-
ance Castalians believe to have achieved in the order is as much an illusion as the
supposed autonomy of citizens in Mann’s depiction of the late Weimar Republic.57
Neither allows for any kind of early German romantic transcendence or golden age.
Knecht can never fully reconcile his desire for more freedom and search for
transcendental truth with the illusions and flaws central to Castalian society. After
obtaining the highest position possible within the order, he decides to leave Castalia
to explore the rest of the world, calling to mind Adorno’s dialectic once again because
Knecht has always associated life outside the Province with the highest forms of free-
dom. Knecht gives up glass bead games, takes only his flute with him when departing,
and prepares to begin a new life as a personal tutor to a friend’s son. Interestingly,
despite the tragic end that he meets, drowning in a lake while swimming with his
future student, many scholars nevertheless interpret the conclusion of Knecht’s story
as hopeful and positive, focusing on what the former magister ludi has learned and
accomplished during his life rather than on his sudden demise.58
I, however, find myself leaning toward far less optimistic readings of Knecht’s
death, especially when considering some of the character’s private thoughts toward
the end of his life.59 While meditating on his choice, Knecht in one instance surpris-
ingly thinks to himself, “that the apparent wilfullness of his present action was in
reality service and obedience, that he was moving not toward freedom, but toward
new, strange, and hitehrto unknown ties; that he was . . . not master, but sacrifice!”
(351). In the process of trying to break free of Castalian rules and regulations, Knecht
immerses himself in a new, unknown system, but a system with its own inherent
limitations nonetheless. The most honest departure from his unfailing obedience to
Castalia is, in the end, just another form of submission. He is compelled to leave a
world, which relies too heavily on organization, for another, which values freedom
too highly—a world in which one is free to become enslaved by a whole new set of
rules and desires.60 Knecht is in essence trading one type of servitude for another.
He cannot escape empirical reality.
12 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

Knecht realizes something important about the fundamental nature of phenom-

enal reality in this late phase of his life. He reflects on his entire Castalian journey
and realizes:

Each time he had taken a larger or smaller step on a seemingly straight road—and
yet he now stood at the end of this road, by no means at the heart of the universe
and the innermost core of the truth. Rather, his present awakening, too, was no
more than a brief opening of his eyes, a finding of himself in a new situation, a
fitting into new constellations. . . . Thus his path had been a circle or an ellipse or
spiral or whatever, but certainly not straight; straight lines evidently belonged only
to geometry, not to nature and life. (350)

Knecht comes to the conclusion that life is essentially cyclical in nature. After leav-
ing one sphere of existence, a person simply enters into another. Knecht has not
successfully attained insight into metaphysical principles. He has not discovered the
inner truth of the world.
This leads one to the conclusion that Hesse’s novel is even more bleak than Mann’s.
Hesse at first appears to escape fascist Germany by setting his story in a future domi-
nated by an elite and brilliant order, whose members have fulfilled Novalis’s highest
aspirations through the creation of the glass bead game. Hesse writes a novel based on
musical structures, but nevertheless fails to provide his protagonist with an ultimate
epiphany. With this conclusion, he demonstrates that there is no end to the struggle
between subject and object, freedom and limitation. Even in the future, one can
no longer hope to escape empirical reality or access a transcendental truth. Music,
language, and phenomenal reality perfectly mirror each other in Doktor Faustus and
Das Glasperlenspiel, but the unbalanced nature of German society transitioning to a
totalitarian regime—with illusion and false freedom at its core—makes it impossible
to even imagine a second golden age at the time these stories were composed. Hesse
and Mann not only write music with words, but they also respond to this early German
romantic shortcoming through the musical analogies incorporated into their stories.
With this, the two novels conclusively mark the end to Novalis’s utopian dreams.61

Notes
1. Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels, eds., The Hesse/Mann Letters: The Correspondence of Hermann
Hesse and Thomas Mann 1910–1955, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1975),
126. Despite the later publication date, it is not common to think of Doktor Faustus as a response
to Das Glasperlenspiel. Mann, for example, writes about the “strange feeling aroused in [him] by
the simultaneity of the two books” in a 1949 letter to Hesse. Carlsson and Michels, Letters, 133.
Theodore Ziolkowski explains, “Thomas Mann . . . was dumbfounded by the conspicuous paral-
lels between Hesse’s [novel] and the novel that he himself was writing.” Theodore Ziolkowski,
foreword to Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York:
Bantam, 1970), v.
 Shelley Hay 13

2. Theodore Ziolkowski, “The Glass Bead Game: Beyond Castalia,” in Hermann Hesse, ed. Harold
Bloom (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2003), 40.
3. In just one example of many, Zeitblom begins describing one of Leverkühn’s violin concerts:
“cast in three movements, it has no key-signature, but . . . three tonalities are built into it: B-flat
major, C major, and D major, of which, as a musician can see, the D major forms are a sort of
secondary dominant, the B-flat major a subdominant, while the C major keeps the strict middle.”
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by
a Friend, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 417.
4. For instance, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose ideas in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The
World as Will and Representation) influenced both Hesse and Mann, uses musical analogies
to better explain his ideas. While Schopenhauer reserves a special position for music in his
ranking of the arts, declaring music a direct copy of the will, he also uses what the reader knows
about harmony to better explain the process of “objectification.” He writes: “the ground-bass is
in harmony what inorganic nature . . . is in the world . . . those higher [voices] represent to me
the plant and animal worlds . . . in the melody . . . I recognize the highest grade of the will’s
objectification, the intellectual life and endeavor of man.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as
Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Zurich: Haffmans, 1988), 258–259.
5. Siglind Bruhn, The Musical Order of the World. Kepler, Hesse, Hindemith (Hillsdale, NY:
Pendragon, 2005), 10.
6. For studies comparing the role of music in Hesse’s and Mann’s works see, G.W. Field, “Music
and Morality in Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse,” in Hesse: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Theodore Ziolkowski (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 94–111; and Matthias
Schulze, Die Musik als zeitgeschichtliches Paradigma. Zu Hesses Glasperlenspiel und Thomas
Manns Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998). For a detailed analysis of the
musical structure of one of Hesse’s earlier works, see Theodore Ziolkowski, “Hermann Hesse’s
Steppenwolf: A Sonata in Prose,” Modern Language Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1958): 115–133.
7. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1989), 8.
8. Plato will not even contemplate music without words, as they are the most important element
to music. He emphasizes, “the [harmonic] mode and rhythm must fit the words.” Plato, “The
Republic,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1035.
9. John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in
Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 24–25.
10. M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1953).
11. Abrams states, for example, that early German Romantics “talked of music as though it were the
very essence and form of the spirit made patent—a play of pure feeling in time, unaltered by its
physical medium.” Abrams, Mirror, 93.
12. Neubauer, Emancipation, 1.
13. Although Richard Wagner is often credited with coining the term “absolute music,” Carl Dahlhaus
has pointed out that the composer’s use of the term is problematic. Dahlhaus reports, “the idea of
absolute music (without the term) appears in E.T.A. Hoffmann, and, inversely, the term (without
the idea) appears in Richard Wagner.” Dahlhaus, Absolute Music, 142. For more information on
the history of absolute music, see also Daniel K.L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction
of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute
Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
14. For an overview of early German romantics’ views on language, literature, and philosophy, see
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature
in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1988).
14 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

15. Novalis writes, “all the superstition and error of every age . . . is based on the confusion of the
symbol with the symbolized.” Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine
Brouillon, trans. David W. Wood (Ithaca, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 126.
16. Novalis, Fragmente und Studien 1799–1800 in Novalis Werke, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Munich:
C.H. Beck, 1969), 541. This and all following citations from Novalis’s Fragmente and Studien
1799–1800 are my own.
17. Neubauer, Emancipation, 202.
18. Novalis writes, “one must write as one composes.” Novalis, Werke, 527.
19. Novalis states, “the poet, rhetorician and philosopher play and compose grammatically.” Novalis,
Encyclopaedia, 97.
20. Novalis, Novalis. Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahoney Stoljar (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997), 83.
21. Novalis mentions this idea of written improvisation in other fragments as well. For example, he
explains, “the poet employs things and words like keys, since the whole of poesy is based on the
active association of ideas—on the self-active, purposeful, and idealistic production of chance”
Novalis, Encyclopaedia, 168. The proposed writing process makes more sense when compared
to the arbitrary, yet purposeful way a musician improvises with his material.
22. Novalis mentions the “musical spirit” of language just a few sentences later. Novalis, Philosophical
Writings, 83.
23. Novalis summarizes this idea with yet another analogy to music, “the musical proportions appear
to me to be the quite actual foundational proportions of nature.” Novalis, Werke, 528.
24. In Novalis’s Naturwissenschaftliche Studien 1798–1799. Novalis, Werke, 437.
25. Novalis, Encyclopaedia, 206.
26. Novalis, The Novices of Sais, trans. Ralph Manheim (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago, 2005), 5.
27. It is obvious how important Immanuel Kant was for early German romanticism. Specifically, his
idea that there is something beyond phenomena or experienced reality—i.e., noumena or “the
thing-in-itself”—resonated strongly with Novalis and his peers.
28. For an overview of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and its relationship to German romanticism, see
Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003). For an overview of Nietzsche’s philosophy and its relationship to Ger-
man romanticism, see Georges Liébert, Nietzsche and Music, trans. David Pellauer and Graham
Parkes. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
29. For example, despite writing a dissertation titled Hermann Hesse and Novalis, Theodore Ziolkowski
only refers to the “musicality and lyrical mystery of Novalis’ prose and poetry” rather than directly
referencing Novalis’s ideas on music and language, or how these ideas connect to Hermann
Hesse’s works. Theodore Ziolkowski, “Hermann Hesse and Novalis” (PhD diss., Yale University,
1957), 193.
30. Scholars such as Siglind Bruhn, Theodore Ziolkowski, and Matthias Schulze have all argued (in
their previously mentioned works) that musical structures underlie a number of Hesse’s works.
Nevertheless, Hesse writes in a 1935 letter to C. Clarus: “Of course one cannot reproduce music
in verses. Instead, that which is found in verses is not the toccata, but rather my subjective
experience, my association when listening to this particular music, that has repeated itself for
years with each listening.” Volker Michels, Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Das Glasperlenspiel”
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 116. My translation.
31. For example, Hermann Kurzke argues that Thomas Mann belongs in the romantic tradition, but
adds that his exposure to the early German romantics was mainly through secondary literature.
He questions whether Mann was a true Novalis fan. Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann. Epoche,
Werk, Wirkung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1985), 185.
32. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster
(New York: Continuum, 2003).
 Shelley Hay 15

33. This “conflict” can be viewed as a constructive or creative process, without many of the word’s
negative connotations. Adorno’s ideas here are related to Novalis’s obviously more optimistic
claims regarding the relationship between composer and material. Novalis’s theory of play would
embrace the tension between convention and creative genius.
34. For information on the influence of Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music on Mann’s Doktor
Faustus, see Evelyn Cobley, “Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics: Thomas Mann’s Doctor
Faustus and Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music,” New German Critique 86 (2002):
43–70.
35. Adorno, Modern Music, 20.
36. For more information on Schoenberg and his music, see Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
37. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1975), 218. Sounding a great deal like Novalis in “Monolog,” Leverkühn
strengthens these connections by defining music as “a magic marriage between theology and the
so diverting mathematic” (132). It is a system of rules that transcend empirical reality.
38. Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans. Richard and Clara
Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 41–42.
39. Cobley references both Mann and Adorno when establishing the connection between counterpoint
and democracy. She explains: “If music reflects in its form the ideological presuppositions of the
historical moment, then counterpoint appears in Doctor Faustus as the most desirable aesthetic
convention . . . it reflects the ideal plurality of the democratic community. . . . In Mann’s transla-
tion of this conception, ‘true counter-point requires the simultaneity of independent voices’; in
political terms, individuals can be integrated into a collectivity without having to sacrifice their
singularity.” Cobley, “Aesthetics,” 55–56.
40. Adorno further explains, “dissonance is nevertheless still more rational than consonance, insofar
as it articulates with great clarity the relationship of the sounds occurring within it—no matter
how complex—instead of achieving a dubious unity through the destruction of those partial
moments present in dissonance, through ‘homogenous’ sound.” Adorno, Modern Music, 59.
41. Zeitblom describes this as a “sort of composing before composition” (196).
42. Specifically, she writes “the organic principle of counterpoint is being reconfigured into a total-
izing system which Mann presumably wants us to associate with fascist totalitarianism.” Cobley,
“Aesthetics,” 66.
43. Adorno writes, “while works of art hardly ever attempt to imitate society and their creators need
know nothing of it, the gestures of the works of art are objective answers to social configurations.”
Adorno, Modern Music, 132. In a similar vein, Vaget writes, “no parallel can be drawn between
. . . Leverkühn’s music and National Socialism. . . . The critical category that truly illuminates
the novel’s design is not that of symbolic equivalence, but that of anticipation. Put simply, the
spiritual and intellectual climate of Leverkühn’s Germany anticipates Germany’s turn to barba-
rism; the spirit in which some of Leverkühn’s compositions are conceived anticipates the spirit of
fascist Germany.” Hans Rudolf Vaget, “National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox
of ‘German’ Music,” in Music and German National Identity, eds. Celia Applegate and Pamela
Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 165.
44. Vaget writes, for example, “Mann, however, did not subscribe to the notion of a dialectical
progression that is crucial to Adorno’s philosophy.” Vaget, “Mann,” 175.
45. Adorno, Modern Music, 39. Specifically, Adorno writes that these people “close themselves off”
from modern music, “not because they do not understand the new, but precisely because they
do understand it. . . . The new exposes, not only the deception of their culture, but also their
incapacity for truth.” Adorno, Modern Music, 59.
46. The narrator refers to this era as the Age of the Feuilleton and uses phrases such as “falseness”
(14), “devaluation” (14), “doom” (15) “decay” (16), and “degeneration” (16) when describing
16 German Studies Review 41 /1 • 2018

the state of art and language at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hermann Hesse, Magister
Ludi, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Bantam, 1970).
47. For more information regarding the influence of romanticism on Hesse, see Joseph Mileck, “The
Prose of Hermann Hesse: Life, Substance and Form,” The German Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1954):
163–174; and Ralph Freedman, “Romantic Imagination: Hermann Hesse as a Modern Novelist,”
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 73, no. 3 (1958): 275–284.
48. Friedrich Schlegel mentions “Symphilosophie” or “symphilosophieren” a number of times in
fragments as well as in letters to his brother August Wilhelm. He theorizes that it may one day
be commonplace to melt and merge science and art to create new kinds of works. Friedrich
Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel. Athenäums-Fragmente und andere Schriften, Holzinger ed. (Berlin:
CreateSpace, 2013), 36. This idea of synthesizing various disciplines is obviously very similar to
Hesse’s glass bead game, “a language of symbols and formulas, in which mathematics and music
[are] reduce[d] . . . to a common denominator” (27).
49. There are countless examples of characters in Hesse’s fiction struggling with language. Pablo
cannot communicate properly with other characters in Der Steppenwolf, Goldmund claims that
communication is pure chance in Narziß und Goldmund (Narcissus and Goldmund), the writer
in Der Kurgast (A Guest at the Spa) complains about the ambiguity of words, and the chronicler
in Das Glasperlenspiel laments the unreliability of written and spoken language. While Hesse
obviously remained a prolific author, it is clear that he must have at least contemplated the limits
of language at times.
50. Two hundred years later, the narrator continues to praise baroque and classical music over the
“worship of harmony in music-making, and . . . that purely sensuous cult of dynamics—a cult
that domainted musical practices for a good two centuries after the time of Beethoven and early
Romanticism” (18).
51. After meeting the future Magister Ludi for the first time, the narrator explains that the Music
Master’s personal assessment of Knecht was to test, “whether the boy had it in him by nature to
become a musician in the higher sense of the word, whether he had the capacity for enthusiasm,
subordination, reverence, worshipful service” (45). The Music Master believed that studying
Knecht’s musical abilities would give him direct insight into whether the boy would be able to
serve the order and fully integrate himself into the world of rules and regulations that the Province
so highly praised. In other words, the Music Master senses, just as Knecht does at this moment,
that Castalian society and baroque music mirror each other in significant ways. For the Music
Master, if the boy can play it, he can live it.
52. While many baroque pieces such as fugues were indeed very organized and structured, the order
seems to ignore the fact that musical improvisation was also central to much baroque music.
For a brief overview on the subject, see Kailan R. Rubinoff, “(Re)creating the Past: Baroque
Improvisation in the Early Music Revival,” New Sound 32 (2009): 79–93.
53. At Knecht’s first encounter with the Music Master, “behind the music being created in his pres-
ence, [Knecht] sensed the world of Mind, the joy-giving harmony of law and freedom, of service
and rule” (43).
54. Of course, Knecht literally means “servant,” emphasizing the battle between freedom and servitude
at play within the protagonist’s basic nature.
55. Nearly identical to the Music Master’s claims, Leverkühn talks about being “bound by a self-
imposed compulsion to order, hence free” (196).
56. Castalians still write a great deal during their general education and the autobiographies that
each pupil is required to invent includes a creative element. However, the emphasis even in these
endeavors is put on the research and scholarship that goes into imagining that one had lived a
past life in another time. It can be seen as a way of allowing young Castalians the opportunity to
safely express and ultimately purge themselves of their creative inclinations. Knecht, pushing
societal boundaries, also writes a great deal of poetry as a young adult.
 Shelley Hay 17

57. It is worth noting once again that this estimation of baroque music in Das Glasperlenspiel is
through the lens of Adorno’s philosophy of modern music. The way in which the order discour-
ages the creative process in writing, music, and glass bead game compositions, supports the idea
that the conventional aspects—the organization—of baroque music are emphasized in Hesse’s
novel rather than creative improvisation—the subjective feeling—that ideally occurs in this
kind of music. This reading stands in opposition to the views of some other scholars. C. Immo
Schneider notes, for example, that both Manfred Bukofzer and Dominque Lingens understand
the role of baroque music, and the fugue in particular, as a way of achieving a balance. Schneider
summarizes: “In a fugue, therefore, countermelodies and interludes always appear, creating in
the aggregate a balance between polyphony and harmony. So too in Das Glasperlenspiel itself,
which brings conflicting elements into confrontation and resolves their differences into harmony.”
This reading provides a relatively positive view of baroque music and Hesse’s novel in general.
However, I argue that there is a deeper and darker layer to Hesse’s focus on baroque music in
Das Glasperlenspiel, which comes to light when the musical analogies in the novel are examined
parallel to similar analogies in Mann’s Doktor Faustus. C. Immo Schneider, “Hermann Hesse
and Music,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2009), 381.
58. For some of these more optimistic and hopeful readings of Das Glasperlenspiel, see I.A. White and
J.J. White, “The Place of Josef Knecht’s ‘Lebensläufe’ within Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlen-
spiel,” The Modern Language Review 81, no. 4 (1986): 930–943; Hilde D. Cohn, “The Symbolic
End of Hermann Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel,” Modern Language Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1950): 347–357;
and Stephen Bandy, “Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel: In Search of Josef Knecht,” Modern
Language Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1972): 299–311.
59 With this conclusion, I find myself joining the ranks of a few scholars who, for various readings,
also hesitate to read Hesse’s novel optimistically. For instance, Ziolkowski mentions the “mistaken
notion that The Glass Bead Game is a utopian novel.” Ziolkowski, Glass Bead Game, 46. Field
calls “the world of the ‘Glasperlenspiel’ . . . imperfect.” Field, Music and Morality, 106. And Mark
Boulby recognizes a “Schopenhauerian undertone” to the novel. Mark Boulby, Hermann Hesse:
His Mind and Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 308.
60. In an earlier conversation with Knecht, the Music Master gives an example of what freedom in
the world outside Castalia is like when he discusses an outsider’s ability to choose a profession.
The Music Master claims that people beyond Castalia’s borders only have the “appearance of
freedom” because an individual eventually “becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent
on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame. . . . He must submit to elections,
must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties,
newspaper” (61). So when Knecht feels compelled to leave the order, he is simply stepping from
one unbalanced system into another. They are both mere microcosms of empirical reality, with
no access to anything transcendental.
61. Some passages in this manuscript have been quoted verbatim from the following source: Shelley
Hay, “Writing Absolute Music: Modernity’s Linguistic Symphony,” (PhD diss., University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010.)