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  • Bay Area ExperimentalismMusic and Technology in the Long 1960s
  • Theodore Gordon

The San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) was an independent nonprofit corporation that fostered a unique community of experimental musicians and artists in the Bay Area in the years 1962–1966. It has been celebrated as both a direct influence on the counterculture that peaked during 1967's "summer of love" and as a decentering foil to more-established histories of experimental music centered in New York and Europe. In the memories of many who were there, the SFTMC opened windows onto many possible worlds through novel technologies, compositional and collaborative logics, flows of instrumental agency and ways of organizing the very sociality and materiality of creative work. This dissertation follows four people—Donald Buchla, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender—and shows how their experimental practices diffracted, producing moments of irreducible difference. It argues that these people sustained a constitutive ambivalence: Even as they cultivated and relied on the institution, they also threatened the very nature of institutionalization. In a truly experimental spirit, one could say, they produced more than they bargained for. Studying moments of experimental difference and excess has consequences not only for understanding compositional and creative logics but also for the inherently political project of organizing—of practices, processes and bodies—in the 1960s Bay Area and well beyond.


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Donald Buchla's Modular Electronic Music System at Mills College, 2016. (Photo © Theodore Gordon)

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Theodore Gordon
ted.gordon@gmail.comPhD dissertation, University of Chicago, U.S.A., 2018.
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