Sound/Light Manipulations From ‘60s Still Pack Power

It has been a while since the reel-to-reel tape recorders and overhead projectors of the San Francisco Tape Music Center were cutting-edge technology, but their influence remains apparent in almost all electronic media work today, at least in the United States. And some of the SFTMC compositions from the mid-’60s hold up very nicely, as the third program of Monday Evening Concerts’ Focus on California festival at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art demonstrated.

For those of us who have known this work only through its descendants, textbook readings and scratchy recordings, the concert was a revelation as well as a celebration. The first half featured Morton Subotnick’s “Mandolin,” Pauline Oliveros’ “Bye Bye Butterfly” and Ramon Sender’s “Desert Ambulance,” all seminal pieces relying on prerecorded tape manipulations of various sound sources. But as inventive and exploitative as the processes are, they’re not about technology but rather about almost shamanistic fantasy, a direct and expressive conjuring with sounds.

Most illuminating--literally--for us with hitherto only secondhand experience of these pieces, were the live light compositions created by Tony Martin, the center’s visual director, for the Subotnick and Oliveros pieces. Working with slides and color liquids under overhead projectors, Martin created organically evolving images rich in hue and texture.

Founded in 1960, the San Francisco Tape Music Center moved to Mills College in 1966 and within a few years its prime movers were all dispersed. (Subotnick ended up at CalArts, and the Contemporary Music Festival there fostered SFTMC-style work in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.) The second half of Monday’s concert displayed some of their more recent efforts.

Including one that was as recent as the moment: “Pauline’s Solo,” Oliveros’ improvisatory gamesmanship with an electronically enhanced accordion. Subotnick on clarinet and Sender on piano joined her for a final improvisation, a marvelously fluid interplay of collective imagination.

Sender and his son, Jonny Sender, collaborated in a live remix of the former’s 1981 “Audition for Three Small Harps in Mode 28,” the composer playing a jangly dilruba harp while his DJ son scratched vinyl. Martin was represented by an evocative 1992 video score, “Who are you looking for is who is looking.” Subotnick sat at a computer onstage, vigorously tweaking a mouse to “conduct” a condensed version of “Gestures: It Begins With Colors,” a sound-and-graphics environment ultimately intended for DVD.