San Francisco Tape Music Center

The San Francisco Tape Music Center was founded in 1962 by composers Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender as a "nonprofit cultural and educational corporation, the aim of which was to present concerts and offer a place to learn about work within the tape music medium". Other composers involved include Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and later William Maginnis and Tony Martin.

The SFTMC had begun as an electronic studio established by the improvisation group Sonics at the San Francisco Conservatory. Sonics was formed in 1961 by Oliveros and other members of one of Robert Erickson's composition seminars. (Von Gunden 1983, p.33)

In 1967 the group accepted a $15,000 grant to join the Mills Center for Contemporary Music, with Oliveros as director, though the last of the original composers left the group that year. When Robert Ashley became the director in 1969 no equipment was left.

The Tape Music Center, and Morton Subotnick in particular, was instrumental in the creation of the Buchla analog modular synthesizer.

Sources

• Von Gunden, Heidi (1983). The Music of Pauline Oliveros. ISBN 0-8108-1600-8.
• Bernstein, David (2008): The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde ISBN 978-0-520-25617-0, ISBN 978-0-520-24892-2

External links

• The San Francisco Tape Music Collective
• San Francisco Tape Music Center: Modest and Vital Drive by Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco Chronicle (Mar 30, 1964)
• The Electronic Music Men By: Edwina Bowe, San Francisco Chronicle (Mar 22, 1964)
• EMF Institute: SFTMC
• San Francisco Tape Music Center: Desert Ambulance by Ramon Sender and Tony Martin; performed by Pauline Oliveros, produced by Randall Packer and Zakros InterArts, October 17 1988, Victoria Theater, San Francisco. Review by Charles Boone.