Name Ramon Sender Role Composer | Education Mills College | |
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Books Being of the Sun, A Death in Zamora, A Planetary Sojourn: Stories - A, Zero weather Similar People Morton Subotnick, Alicia Bay Laurel, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, Maggi Payne | ||
Ramon sender on san francisco tape music center 1997
Ramón Sender Barayón (born October 29, 1934) is a composer, visual artist and writer. He was the co-founder, with Morton Subotnick, of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962. He is the son of Spanish writer Ramón J. Sender.
Contents
- Ramon sender on san francisco tape music center 1997
- Education
- San Francisco Tape Music Center
- Morningstar and Wheeler Ranches
- Writings
- Music
- Recordings
- Books
- References
Education
Sender was born in Madrid, Spain. He studied piano with George Copeland, harmony with Elliott Carter, and counterpoint and fugue with Harold Shapero (1948–1951). Sender attended the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome and Columbia University in New York, where he studied with Henry Cowell. He also studied with Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1959–1962) and at Mills College, where he studied with Darius Milhaud. Sender holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an M.A. from Mills College.
San Francisco Tape Music Center
Sender co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962 with Morton Subotnick and also collaborated with composers and visual artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Martin, Joseph Byrd, Terry Riley, William Maginnis, and many others until 1966 when the Center was incorporated into Mills College. It was later named the Mills Center for Contemporary Music and continues to function today.
Sender participated with Don Buchla in the design of the Buchla Box, one of the first music synthesizers.
Morningstar and Wheeler Ranches
In January 1966, he co-produced the Trips Festival with Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. It was a three-day event that, in conjunction with The Merry Pranksters, brought together the nascent hippie movement for the first time.
In April 1966, Sender became the first resident at Lou Gottlieb's Morning Star Ranch (Sender has, at times, referred to himself as Ramon Sender Morningstar) open land commune, which evolved into a Digger Farm / open land commune in 1967. After the residents' homes were bulldozed by Sonoma County authorities three times, he moved into the Wheeler Ranch in Occidental, California; he lived and worked in the area until 1979.
One of the residents there was Alicia Bay Laurel, writer and musician known for her 1970 best-seller Living on Earth. He collaborated with her on another book, Being of the Sun, which contains information about homemade music, drones, modes, and open tunings as a means of spiritual growth, as well as information about yoga, creating ritual, and forming intentional communities.
Sender is also a visual artist whose visual works are sampled on his web site and in a 2009 book, Barayon, a Catalog of Prints, Drawings, Original Art. The book is based on a one-man show at the Gallery Sanchez in 2008.
After the death of Sender's daughter Xavie in 1989, he founded the Peregrine Foundation (for people "living in or exiting from experimental social groups"). He was the administrator of the foundation until 1999.
Sender identifies himself as a "transcendental, post-monotheist hippie pagan sunworshipper, with one foot planted in the nondual teaching of Candice O'Denver and the other in the Archaic Revival culture".
Writings
To distinguish himself from his father Ramon J. Sender, a well-known Spanish novelist, he uses the Spanish-style name Ramon Sender Barayón. This is also to honor his late mother Amparo Barayón.
Sender's novel Zero Weather was published in 1980. He has several other unpublished manuscripts and some of his short stories are published on the internet. In 1989, Sender published Death in Zamora, a book investigating the execution of his mother by Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War. Most recently, he has published an anthology of his short stores and essays, titled A Planetary Sojourn. He also wrote a novel based on his experiences at the Tape Music Center, entitled Naked Close Up, which was published in 2012 as an ebook by Intelligent Arts Publishing, a project of The Electronic Music Foundation in Albany, New York.