When I was younger, about 14 or 15, before laser discs came into general use, we had cassette tapes.  The quality was not always the best, but I kind of miss them.

At some point someone lend me a cassette tape with strange, very strange, very very strange music.  I no longer remember who or when, but it was probably my friend J.  (For reasons of national security I have to withhold his full name.)  Listening to the music was the strangest trip, even without any form of “enhancement” that I would later discover.  I only had the tape for a short while, but I was charmed by the music and/or sounds and for a long time afterwards I tried to find out who the artist was.

Some time after 2000 (I do not remember when) I discovered that it was Tomita‘s version of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and perhaps some other pieces as well; “The Planets” ring a faint bell as do “The Great Gate of Kiev”.  It was a happy day.  (Obviously I wasn’t very familiar with either Stravinsky or Mussorgsky when I was young.)  I see on Wikipedia that he has kept on releasing albums, but I only have his Greatest Hits.  I thought about buying his collected works (called Kyo), but I think that it is a little expensive and probably I won’t enjoy it as much.

Part of the enchantment is that memory of my first encounter with this kind of music.  I’m not sure what Tomita thinks of his music, but to me it represented a form of anti-establishmentarianism.  I wasn’t aware of punk at that time, and I probably wasn’t mature enough to appreciate it or even the much subtler messages of rock.  In any case, their popularity had diluted their subversiveness by that time.  And what’s more, Tomita’s music operated on a more intellectual level.  Blegh, all these terms.  I mean simply that it planted the seed in my mind that music could break out of its genre, that it did not have to live in a specific box, and that music itself could challenge the definition of music that most people believed in.

Well, it sounds very intellectual, but the music also touched me on a emotional level.  Perhaps that is why it interested me in the first place.  I’m not sure that it would have the same effect on me today if I encountered it now for the first time.  Time makes fools of us all.  And makes us jaded.