San Francisco Tape Music Center
Bay Area studio and collective founded 1962 by Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick, birthplace of the Buchla modular system.
Growing out of composer Ramon Sender’s “Sonics” concert series at the San Francisco Conservatory (first performed December 1961, featuring Sender, Pauline Oliveros, and Terry Riley among others), the San Francisco Tape Music Center was founded in the summer of 1962 by Sender and Morton Subotnick, initially equipped with little more than six audio oscillators and some tape recorders. Pauline Oliveros, artist Tony Martin, and technician William Maginnis soon joined, and the collective commissioned engineer Don Buchla to build the Buchla 100, among the first modular voltage-controlled synthesizers. From 1963 the Center occupied 321 Divisadero Street, a building it shared with radio station KPFA and Anna Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop; neighbor Richard Brautigan held poetry readings there, including the 1965 release party for his book A Confederate General from Big Sur. In 1966 the Center accepted a Rockefeller Foundation grant to join Mills College as the Mills Center for Contemporary Music, with Oliveros as founding director.
