The San Francisco Tape Music Center 1961 <> NOW

WOW & FLUTTER was the first festival EMPAC staged in 2004, hosted by the student-run Rensselaer Playhouse as the construction for the EMPAC building had only just begun. The following videos give access to the documentation of the entire two-day program — 16 performances in total.

Integrating the radical sensibilities of the avant-garde and the counter-culture of the 1960’s with the arts, film, and performance practices, the members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) created artworks whose impact is still being felt today.

Pauline Oliveros was a Distinguished Research Professor of Music in the Rensselaer Department of the Arts at the time the Wow & Flutter festival took place. By inviting her and her fellow founding members of the SFTMC to perform both their classic and contemporary works, students could experience that being the age of their grandparents, technology, and a lively and experimenting spirit plus artistic relevance were not exclusive of each other.

Formed in 1962 by Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, and Pauline Oliveros, the San Francisco Tape Music Center was established with the assistance of engineer Michael Callahan. Tony Martin and William Maginnis joined shortly after. Composers who worked in the Tape Music Center included Terry Riley and Steve Reich, among others, and major collaborators included David Tudor, John Cage, and Anna Halprin, whose Dancers Workshop moved into the adjoining studio. The Tape Music Center’s “do it yourself” ethos and commitment to experimentation has made them some of the most forward-thinking artists of our time. Their pioneering work with electronic music, as well as mixing film and images with sound during a performance, set the bar for all that has come since.

Circuitry for Percussion and Light (1967)
Circuitry was composed in 1967 in collaboration with the visual composer-performer Anthony Martin. The score is expressed for the performers by lights illuminating a three-by-four matrix score. The matrix contains columns of three choices each for TEMPO, DYNAMICS, METHOD, and STYLE. Four performers interpret the score using percussion arrays, and a fifth performer plays a drum set expressing a variety of popular styles. Each of the five performers plays when cued by his desk light. All lights respond to the players’ sounds that are picked up by microphones, filtered, and sent to silicon-controlled rectifiers that turn the desk and score lights on and off thus the performers are in a kind of feedback loop that controls the performance and also the artist's lighting for the piece. The performance was recreated using the original equipment constructed for the performance in 1966 by Carl Countryman. The equipment was refurbished by Bob Bielecki. William Maginnis, who performed again in 2004, was the original drum set player in 1967.
—Pauline Oliveros

Tropical Fish Opera (1962)
During the Sonics series of concerts at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1961–62), it became traditional from the beginning to include a live improvisation, and many of these events were named "operas," inasmuch as they frequently included dancers from the Ann Halprin Dancers' Workshop and thus contained a theatrical element. For one of these, I borrowed a tank of tropical fish from a local pet store and placed it as the score center stage. The first performers included Pauline Oliveros on French horn, myself on piano, Loren Rush on double bass, and Morton Subotnick on clarinet. Thus, the Tropical Fish Opera was born, and subsequently enjoyed a number of performances, including one that the famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen commented on, under the heading "Culture Corner". Yehudi Menuhin even mentioned it in passing in his public television series on contemporary music during a dour mention of Chance Music, and I paraphrase: ''And there even are some composers who use a tank of fish as a score!"

The idea of a three-dimensional score (tank) with movable notes (fish) who can either be pitched high (top of the tank) or loud or soft (close to performer or further away) always intrigued me because the same score was being read from three different directions. Therefore some sort of thematic unity emerges, albeit of an unusual type.
—Ramon Sender

Bye Bye Butterfly (1965)
Bye Bye Butterfly was composed in 1965 at the San Francisco Tape Music Center studio using two Hewlett-Packard oscillators, two Ampex stereo tape machines, a phonograph and record, and patch bay. The piece was played in real time and recorded. All material was delayed by stringing tape from the supply reel of the first tape deck to the take-up reel of the second tape deck. Signals from the first track were patched from the second machine back to the second track of the first machine and from the second track back to the first track to achieve a crisscrossing delay pattern. There was no mixer.
—Pauline Oliveros

Visual composition for Bye Bye Butterfly: I first performed with this inspiring work by Pauline at a retrospective concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I've since developed it into a traveling visual composition package.
—Tony Martin

Mandolin (1963)
Mandolin is a concert version of the original theater piece A Theater Piece after Sonnet No. 47 of Petrarch, premiered in 1963 at the SFTMC. This was my second large-scale theater (multimedia) work; the first, Sound Blocks: An Heroic Vision, was premiered in 1961. The original Petrarch theater piece was a full-evening work. The viola part was performed by Linn Subotnick (the viola imbedded in the electronic score was recorded by her as well), the set was by Judy Davis, movement and voice were by John Graham, and the lighting and visual composition were by Tony Martin. I thought that I would step back and say goodbye to the nineteenth century and try to move on from there, rather than thinking of using new media as a "next step" from the modernist sensibility and the early twentieth-century break from the nineteenth century. I used a work by Franz Liszt, Transcendental Etude after Petrarch's Sonnet No. 47, as a focal point in the work. (The grand piano is seen without a performer playing Liszt's piano etude.)

In the original version, John Graham read the entire sonnet. In this version, it is left out, as well as the movement and set. The set was the construction of a wall across the front of the stage. I continued to develop my thinking about the nature of a "theater piece." It took many forms and ended with Intimate Immensity, premiered a few years ago at Lincoln Center.
—Morton Subotnick

Mandolin (1963): I've always performed this visual composition using two overhead projectors. For me, it is an exhilarating painterly and poetic expression of mid-1960s feeling. It became a classic San Francisco Tape Music Center signature piece. Direct configuring of abstract visual language and dynamics is brought into play working with both dry and liquid ingredients together. There is a gradual shift in the work from the worldly stage and piano, applying mostly blue green and bits of light, to an otherworldly bloom of light, yellow and red, rising and expanding out of that. This ultimately evokes what I refer to as a kind of "temple in the sky," and then, as a return, a long passage to a darker mysterious, but inviting, space.
—Tony Martin

Pauline's Solo (1996-2007)
Listening to this space I sound the space. Listening to the energy of all who are present I sound this energy. Listening to my listening and your listening I make this music here and now with the assistance of all that there is. I dedicate this music to a world without war.

The Expanded Instrument System (EIS) is continually evolving. EIS processes and distributes the sounds of the accordion during the performance. Nothing is prerecorded. Sounds are picked up by internal microphones in the accordion, sent to up to forty delay processors. The delays are modulated by other wave forms and distributed to the eight speakers in geometrical patterns. The ten possible patterns are also determined by algorithms, as well as by the size and speed of the selected patterns. The EIS developed from the composer's work with tape delay that began in the 1960s at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The evolution of the EIS has moved from multiple tape machines to digital delay processors to the computer. The MAX/MSP interface for EIS was programmed by Stephan Moore with design by Pauline Oliveros.
—Pauline Oliveros

Silent Light (1967, 2004)
Silent Light was first composed as an attempt at pure light "visual music," first performed in 1967 at NYU. In that early version and the current 2004 version, performers make use of the pure light of flashlights, various lenses, and differently silvered mirrors. Combined with this is imagery from customized projection apparatus. Film and overhead projection were originally used, and now in this version, I perform live, using a stand-alone computer program created for me by Hunter Ochs. This is video-projected on the stage and throughout the auditorium. Specific kinds of individual events of different feeling occur in parts of the space, making a concentric event of center, midspace, and periphery. There is an exchange of high-energy intensity and peacefulness between these areas. The differing character of projected light makes a ten-minute journey that begins in question and provocation and ends in illumination and light as nutrient energy. Silent Night was performed on both nights of the Wow & Flutter festival.
—Tony Martin

Desert Ambulance (1964)
Desert Ambulance was composed for Pauline Oliveros. The source tapes were created on a Chamberlin Music Master and then sync'd to a score that I dictated onto tape for the accordionist to hear over earphones. This allowed her to perform in semidarkness, so that the projections could be seen. Desert Ambulance was taken on the SFTMC tour that same summer, and over time has received more performances than any other piece of mine. The name derives from a marvelous photograph of a missionary ambulance, vintage 1928, that I found thrown away on the street. Some thirty years later, I was able to relate it to the French Red Cross ambulance that evacuated me and my sister to Bayonne from civil war Spain in 1936, and whose looks must have imprinted themselves in my two-year-old brain as impressive. At the time of its first performance, I described the piece as "a vehicle of mercy sent out into the waste-land of (academic) modern music."
—Ramon Sender

Desert Ambulance (1964): Hand-painted 16mm film projected on Pauline and her accordion provides a high-energy visual pulsation as a long dramatic beginning for the piece. Figural connections are made with film collaging of found and filmed magical and humorous animations of children, people walking, and hands that project on the accordion. At a crucial moment, all of this becomes immersed in a larger, more majestic environment by very slowly blending projected hand-painted 2x2 glass slides in enormous scale above the performer, arriving ultimately, at the cathartic closing of the piece.
—Tony Martin

Until Spring Revisited (2003-)
Until Spring Revisited is a general title I am using for the development of a full evening laptop event. The beginnings of this date back to the development of the Buchla Synthesizer at the SFTMC in the early 1960s, when I had a dream of a "black box"-type electronic tool that would be in the home so that, like a painting easel, it would be a sound/music generator for creating new sound art pieces. This is not the right place for the history of all this, but it relates to the laptop evening I am developing. First, I had imagined that the new technology would allow for people to create new art with sound, and that it would be done in the home and, perhaps, for the home environment. When, a few years later, I had the opportunity to do a work for Nonesuch Records, Silver Apples of the Moon (1966-67), I pursued the idea that the Buchla Box, though brilliantly versatile, did not lend itself to the kind of large-scale work I was after. This meant that to make a work thirty minutes long involved tape recorders.

The interaction with the equipment was thus limited to only portions of the composing experience. Also, it became clear that my aesthetic understanding about what kind of experience I hoped to end up with was unclear. As time went on, and I was fortunate enough to be commissioned to do more works for the record, I finally came to do a work where I felt that the aesthetic issue had been resolved. That work was Until Spring (1976). However, the issue of being able to interact with the medium for long periods of time was still beyond my grasp. Now, with the new generation of laptops, I feel that I can again pursue this and complete what I had hoped to accomplish back on Divisadero Street in the 1960s.

The title refers to the work Until Spring from 1976. Some of the materials used in these performances are from the 1976 work, the rest of the materials are new. There is no ONE version. Rather, it is an ongoing examination of prepared materials that are improvised with each time I perform.
—Morton Subotnick

Kore (1962)
Kore was created in the small studio I put together in the attic of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1961 and received its first performance on the Sonics electronic music series I produced that winter with the collaboration of Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick, among others. It was the third tape composition I created there and is dedicated to my daughter Xaverie (1955-89).The piece utilized an Ampex 403 recorder that had a left-hand drive and a long tension-adjusting arm on the take-up reel. This allowed me to bypass the drive and just control the recording speed by hand-adjusting the tension on the take-up. Sound sources included scraping bass piano strings with a plastic box and a group of conservatory students whom I invited up to the attic a few times after chorus rehearsal to improvise sounds for me. Kore is the name of Persephone as a young maiden. In the myth, she was abducted into the underworld by Hades (Pluto) who had fallen in love with her. He finally made a deal with her mother, Demeter, that allowed the daughter to return to the world every six months, thus creating the rhythm of springtime rebirth and winter death.

Mircea Eliade recounts how the symbolic death of Persephone had great consequences for mankind: ''As a result of it, an Olympian and benevolent goddess temporarily inhabited the kingdom of the dead. She had annulled the unbridgeable distance between Hades and Olympus. Mediatrix between the two divine worlds, she could thereafter intervene in the destiny of mortals." ( Mircea Eliade, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, vol 1 of A History of Religious Ideas [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978-85], 290-301.)
—Ramon Sender

Kore: A few years after Ramon wrote this piece I worked intuitively on overheads and layered slides in performances in the Bay Area and the Divisadero Street space. For a horizontally traveling image of the ancient goddess, Kore, I built a two-direction turntable with a complex prism that defracted the light and multiplied the image as it drifted across the projected environment. The thematic material continues to be exciting to me as a painter much in love with Greco-Roman art. —Tony Martin

On each evenings of the festival, the five founding members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center — Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, William, Maginnis and Martin — joined in an improvisation. This is the improvisation from the first evening.

Great Grandpa Lemuel's Death-Rattle Reincarnation Blues in F Sharp (1981)
This piece grew out of a comment Stewart Brand once made to me. I had been describing how I created a loop of the opening phrase of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and fed it through an Ampex PD-IO tape duplication system ( one loop through one playback and three slave recorders). Since the recorders had no ~rase heads, the music merely stacked up over itself until it had randomized the original into white noise. Meanwhile, I had recorded the process onto another machine and used the resulting tape as the source for a tape piece entitled Wagner (currently I can't seem to find a copy). Anyway, Stewart said, "Why don't you do it the other way 'round? Start with white noise and have the music gradually emerge?" I was delighted by his comment, and when about ten years later, Mills College invited me to give a retrospective concert, I decided to create a new piece based on Stewart's suggestion.

I asked Bill Maginnis if I could record a blues phrase with his Dixieland band. Once recorded, I tried to overdub it several hundred times at Mills on their new 24-track, but the results were disappointing. Gradually, I realized I would have to use a PD-10 tape duplicator. So I searched all over the Bay Area, and I finally found one still in existence — the PD-10 was by now practically an antique — at a school that trained people to become sound engineers. This time I threaded the loop backward through all four machines and punched the start button, recording the gradual decay of the sound into white noise on another recorder. Once finished, I then reversed the reels and voila! Out of chaos gradually emerged a Dixieland band. The lyrics I wrote in an essay titled Why Nature Grew Humans (1976). part of a series I named Maybe So Stories with a tip of my cortex to Rudyard Kipling.
—Ramon Sender

Apple Box Double (1965)
Apple Box Double was performed by the composer with David Tudor in 1965 at San Francisco State College and then at the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The composer was fond of the resonance of apple boxes. She placed small vibrant objects on the boxes amplified by Piezo contact microphones. Each performer selected his or her own objects and methods of performing. Apple Box Double is on New World Records CD 80567, Music from the Once Festival 1961-1966, disk 5, I964-I966 (2003).
—Pauline Oliveros

Every evening of the festival, the five principal members of the SFTMC — Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, William Maginnis, and Tony Martin — joined in an improvisation. This is the improvisation from the second evening.

Release (2004)
I began thinking of this work in 2001. At that time I was beginning to try to understand what it meant to me to become seventy years old. I decided at that time to create a work for this combination to meld my early career as a clarinetist with my later career as a composer using technology. For me, those two worlds were always parallel but distinctly different and, perhaps, opposing realities. I stopped being a professional clarinetist in 1965. Prior to that, maybe in the late 1950s, I frequently performed Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. This work had a profound and lasting affect on the evolution of my aesthetic sensibility. Having decided to create a work that would somehow tie my early career with now, the Quartet far the End of Time combination seemed natural. And, since my work for the past several years has been developing a series of works for "surround sound," the combination of the quartet and the electronics seemed natural. Around the same time (2002), the death of a boy very close to our family altered my life and all of those close to me.

I remember then, and still now, feeling that the moment of dying is a release of life from the body. That sense of release became the first notion for the new work and eventually became the title.
—Morton Subotnick

The San Francisco Tape Music Center 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde
by David Bernstein (Editor), John Rockwell (Foreword), Johannes Goebel (Preface)
University of California Press, 2008

This publication came out of the WOW & FLUTTER festival in collaboration between EMPAC and University of California Press.

This book tells the story of the influential group of creative artists — Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, William Maginnis, and Tony Martin — who connected music to technology during a legendary era in California’s cultural history. An integral part of the robust San Francisco “scene,” the San Francisco Tape Music Center developed new art forms through collaborations with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, David Tudor, Ken Dewey, Lee Breuer, the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Ann Halprin Dancers’ Workshop, Canyon Cinema, and others. Told through vivid personal accounts, interviews, and retrospective essays by leading scholars and artists, this work, capturing the heady experimental milieu of the sixties, is the first comprehensive history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Johannes Goebel curator – Jason Steven Murphy project manager – Karin Hillen, Kim Gardner administration – Shannon Johnson, web/IT — Todd Vos audio – Jay Maury lighting and projection – Kevin Luddy logistics assistant – Christopher Rines, Kara Janeczko, Pete Hallsworth stagehands – Zulma Aguiar research assistant – Jennifer Rush, Ryan McAlpine student assistants
Documentation: Frans Swarte audio – Roger Bailey, Eleanor Goldsmith, Michael DiPaolo
video – Andy Clark, Dan Ostrov student assistants