In fact he made great progress in music. By his second or third year at Waldzell he was reading and playing the notations, clefs, abbreviations, and figured basses of all centuries and styles with tolerable fluency. He had made himself at home in the realm of Western music, as much of it as has been preserved for us, in that special way that proceeds from practical craftsmanship and is not above taking utmost heed of a piece of music’s sensuous and technical aspects as a means for penetrating the spirit. His intense concern with the sensuous quality of music, his efforts to understand the spirit of various musical styles from the physical nature of the sounds, the sensations in the ear, deterred him for a remarkably long time from devoting himself to the elementary course in the Glass Bead Game. In one of his lectures in subsequent years he remarked: “One who knows music only from the extracts which the Glass Bead Game distills from it may well be a good Glass Bead Game player, but he is far from being a musician, and presumably he is no historian either. Music does not consist only in those purely intellectual oscillations and figurations which we have abstracted from it. All through the ages its pleasure has primarily consisted in its sensuous character, in the outpouring of breath, in the beating of time, in the colorations, frictions, and stimuli which arise from the blending of voices in the concord of instruments. Certainly the spirit is the main thing, and certainly the invention of new instruments and the alteration of old ones, the introduction of new keys and new rules or new taboos regarding construction and harmony are always mere gestures and superficialities, even as the costumes and fashions of nations are superficialities. But one must have apprehended and tasted these superficial and sensuous distinctions with the senses to be able to interpret from them the nature of eras and styles. We make music with our hands and fingers, with our mouths and lungs, not with our brains alone, and someone who can read notes but has no command of any instrument should not join in the dialogue of music. Thus, too, the history of music is hardly to be understood solely in terms of an abstract history of styles. For example, the periods of decadence in music would remain totally incomprehensible if we failed to recognize in each one of them the preponderance of the sensuous and quantitative elements over the ‘spiritual element.’ "
For a time it appeared as if Knecht had decided to become nothing but a musician. In favor of music he neglected all the optional subjects, including the introductory course in the Glass Bead Game, to such an extent that toward the end of the first semester the headmaster called him to an accounting. Knecht refused to be intimidated; he stubbornly insisted on his rights. It is said that he told the headmaster: “If I fail in any official subject, you could rightly reprimand me. On the other hand I have the right to devote three quarters or even four quarters of my free time to music. I stand on the statutes of the school.” Headmaster Zbinden was sensible enough not to insist, but he naturally remembered this student and is said to have treated him with cold severity for a long time.
This peculiar period in Knecht’s student days lasted for more than a year, probably for about a year and a half. He received normal but not brilliant marks and — to judge by the incident with the headmaster — his behavior was marked by a rather defiant withdrawal, no noteworthy friendships, but in compensation this extraordinary passion for music-making. He abstained from almost all private studies, including the Glass Bead Game. Several of these traits are undoubtedly signs of puberty; during this period he probably encountered the other sex only by chance, and mistrustfully; presumably he was quite shy — like so many Eschholz pupils if they do not happen to have sisters at home. He read a great deal, especially the German philosophers: Leibniz, Kant, and the Romantics, among whom Hegel exerted by far the strongest attraction upon him.
