When I was a child, I had[1] a cassette player[2] of a type that would be immediately familiar to anyone over thirty, and possibly outside of the experience of anyone under 20. A flattish rectangular prism about half the size of a shoebox, it had a neat row of buttons that required some effort to depress: REC, REW, FF, PLAY, STOP, EJECT. For reasons I never questioned, the REC button would not work on its own; it only attained its full meaning when deployed in conjunction with the PLAY button. By contrast, EJECT simultaneously managed to open a window 45 degrees AND pop the cassette out of its bedding with a single stroke. So, one button did half of its job, while another took on two tasks.
Said device was an endlessly useful marvel. My family could script mini-theatricals and record them for posterity, or at least until we needed the same cassette to record something else. Unethical spies-in-training could surreptitiously do the double-press on REC and PLAY, leave the room for an hour, then come back to discover what others talked about in their absence (the resulting aural document was inevitably more silence than golden nugget, but the activity itself was its own reward).
But my favorite use: creating a mixtape[3] of randomly selected songs from my impossibly cool older siblings’ record collections. At bedtime, I would slip my prized device under the pillow, press play, and drift off to sleep with these musical distortions rumbling through my dreams.
All of this came back to me the other day as I taught a composition master class at the Conservatorio Superior de Música in Alicante. I was playing the Daedalus Quartet’s recording of my fourth string quartet and I realized how certain elements in the piece are connected to that sound world of my childhood. For example, the transition that begins at 4:30 in the first movement is clearly (to me, from this vantage point) an evocation of distorted bubble-gum pop played back by a cassette machine whose batteries are in their death throes.
Lots of elements in that piece connect to my youth; this is just one example.
Alicante is, btw, absolutely gorgeous. I won’t distort its beauty by sharing my amateurish photos; you can easily find better. Suffice it to say you can’t go wrong putting a conservatory on a mountaintop overlooking the Mediterranean.
[1] In my family, individuals received birthday or Christmas gifts that ended up being used communally with fair frequency, so when I say “I had” I don’t actually know whether the object belonged to me in a precise sense or if I was just the hog who glommed onto it the most.
[2] At that time, the proper term was “cassette machine,” because “machine” was still, I suppose, a novel enough idea that the word was liberally appended to most any device — washing machine, sewing machine, etc. — in a way that seems completely superfluous now: imagine if we still held to this tradition and referred to our everyday appliances as video machines, wifi machines, microwave machines, etc.
[3] This was back in the 60s, well over a decade before mixtapes became commonplace. I was not ahead of the curve: the sound quality was horrendous. Recordings were made by holding the cassette machine near the stereo speakers (said stereo was a large piece of furniture that required a weekly squirting of Pledge, like the dinner table). The innovations in chrome and metal tape that would make recording music possible were still years away.