It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he had done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music . . . so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.

-- Hermann Hesse
(from The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi),
translated by Richard and Clara Winston)