164 Log 231007_16: Interview Ramón Sender and Judy Levy–Sender

Ramon Sender studied with Harold Shapero in New York, with Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and with Darius Milhaud at Mills College. He was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) in 1962, alongside Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick. Judy Levy-Sender worked as a teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), specializing in ESL and bilingual education for junior high and high school students. She is also a “wrartist,” creating drawn and written lines that are whimsical and expressive. The interview with Ramón Sender and Judy Levy–Sender offers a practice-oriented perspective on the emergence and working methods of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC) as an open environment for production and performance. At its core is an experimental use of tape technology – particularly delay, looping, and feedback – not in line with European studio aesthetics of montage or precise editing, but as a means of generating unpredictability and interaction, in the spirit of John Cage’s concept of experimental music and Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening. The interview also addresses the DIY character of the SFTMC, which emerged out of material necessity, including its self-built studios. Visual elements, light works, and interdisciplinary collaborations were early on understood as integral to performance practice, expanding notions of concert and sonic space. Finally, it raises issues of archival transmission: the legacy of the SFTMC is not a closed historical chapter, but an open, process-based experimental practice – whose significance lies precisely in its resistance to institutionalization.