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Thesis Info

LABS ID
00691
Thesis Title
Bay Area Experimentalism: Music and Technology in the Long 1960s
Author
Theodore Gordon
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
PhD
Year
2018
Number of Pages
295
University
University of Chicago
Thesis Supervisor
Seth Brodsky
Supervisor e-mail
Other Supervisor(s)
Language(s) of Thesis
en
Department / Discipline
Music History
Copyright Ownership
Theodore Gordon
Languages Familiar to Author
en
URL where full thesis can be found
Keywords
experimental music, bay area, san francisco tape music center, Buchla
Abstract: 200-500 words
The San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) was an independent, non-profit corporation that fostered a unique community of experimental musicians and artists in the Bay Area in the short window between 1962–1966. It has been celebrated as both a direct influence on the Bay Area counterculture that peaked during the “summer of love” in 1967, and as a decentering foil to more established histories of experimental music, particularly those centered in New York and Europe. In the memories of many who were there, the SFTMC opened a window onto many possible worlds, with new technologies, new logics of composition and collaboration, new flows of agency between humans and instruments, and new 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—from the late 1950s through 1966, retracing their divergent trajectories through the SFTMC as they tried to open up new worlds of musicality. Focusing on moments of irreducible difference between these four trajectories, I explore how the experimental practices of these four musicians sustained a constitutive institutional ambivalence: even as they cultivated and relied on the institution of the SFTMC, these practices threatened the very nature of institutionalization. In a truly experimental spirit, one could say, they produced more than they bargained for. These moments of experimental difference and excess can help reshape our understanding not only of compositional and creative logics, but of the inherently political project of organizing—practices, processes, and also bodies—in the 1960s Bay Area and well beyond.