The San Francisco Tape Music Center

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde / A nice 320-page paperback, about 7 by 10 inches / ISBN 9781953691002. (This publisher confirms this no longer comes with a dvd, though you can access that material at the University of California Press site.)

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"As I devoured this vibrantly detailed history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, I found myself wishing repeatedly that I'd been born a couple of decades earlier, so I could have been present for a string of historic events: the debut of the Don Buchla synthesizer, the premiere of Terry Riley's In C, Ramon Sender's Tropical Fish Opera, Pauline Oliveros's multimedia concert at the Trips Festival. The heroes of the Center were in the business of realizing unimagined possibilities, and they did much to shape the legendary culture of San Francisco in the later sixties."—Alex Ross

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.

“An outlandish episode on nearly every page of this book...A probing account.” ― Los Angeles Times

“The collision of historically incompatible characters is hard to believe: It is a Kevin Bacon game...of avant-garde and pop culture in the ‘60s.”--Artforum