Ramon Sender Oral History San Francisco Conservatory of Music Library & Archives San Francisco Conservatory of Music Library & Archives 50 Oak Street San Francisco, CA 94102 Interview conducted April 14, 16 and 21, 2014 Mary Clare Bryztwa and Tessa Updike, Interviewers San Francisco Conservatory of Music Library & Archives Oral History Project The Conservatory’s Oral History Project has the goal of seeking out and collecting memories of historical significance to the Conservatory through recorded interviews with members of the Conservatory's community, which will then be preserved, transcribed, and made available to the public. Among the narrators will be former administrators, faculty members, trustees, alumni, and family of former Conservatory luminaries. Through this diverse group, we will explore the growth and expansion of the Conservatory, including its departments, organization, finances and curriculum. We will capture personal memories before they are lost, fill in gaps in our understanding of the Conservatory's history, and will uncover how the Conservatory helped to shape San Francisco's musical culture throughout the past century. Ramon Sender Interview This interview was conducted at Ramon Sender’s home in San Francisco on April 14, 16 and 21, 2014 by Mary Clare Brzytwa and Tessa Updike. Mary Clare Brzytwa Mary Clare Brzytwa is Assistant Dean for Professional Development and Academic Technology at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Specializing in electronic music with a background in classical flute and improvisation, she has played festivals internationally and at home including Festival des Musiques Innovatrices, Gilles Peterson’s World Wide Festival, La Siestes Electroniques Festival, Unlimited 21, and The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. Formerly Director of Professional Development at Oberlin Conservatory and Producer at Radio Village Nomade, Mary Clare has worked on countless projects ranging from appearances on records by bands such as the Boredoms to creating sound design for award winning films. Mary Clare earned a BA in composition with an emphasis in electronic media from Mills College and an MFA as a Performer/Composer at California Institute of the Arts. Tessa Updike Tessa Updike is the archivist for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Tessa holds a B.A. in visual arts and has her Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons College in Boston. Previously she has worked for the Harvard University Botany Libraries and Archives and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. San Francisco Conservatory of Music / Ramon Sender Oral History 1 Use and Permissions This manuscript is made available for research purposes. All literary rights to the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Conservatory’s Archivist or Library Director. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to: San Francisco Conservatory of Music Library & Archives 50 Oak Street San Francisco, CA 94102 San Francisco Conservatory of Music / Ramon Sender Oral History 2 Ramon Sender and Riqui, 2014 Ramon Sender was born in Madrid, Spain in October of 1934 to Ramon and Amparo Sender. Among his music teachers were George Copeland, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell and Robert Erickson. Ramon studied at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, received his Bachelors of Music in Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and his Masters from Mills College. As a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Ramon built an electronic music studio in the attic of the school’s previous location at 1201 Ortega Street. Upon graduating from the Conservatory in 1962, he co-founded with Morton Subotnick the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which was later renamed the Mills Center for Contemporary Music, and is still in existence today. Through the years, Ramon has collaborated with a number of composers and visual artists, including Anthony Martin, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and William Maginnis. In 1966, he co-produced the Trips Festival with Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand; a large psychedelic event in San Francisco that featured, among others, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Aside from his music, Ramon is the author of a number of novels, novels, short stories and essays. Samples of his writings can be found on his website (www.raysender.com). San Francisco Conservatory of Music / Ramon Sender Oral History 3 Table of Contents Early years (Spain) …………………………………………………………….………..… 6-11 New York and Julia Davis ……………………………………………………….….…... 12-15 Early education (piano teachers, pre-prep and prep school) ……………………….…..….. 16-18 George Copeland ………………………………………………………………….…… 18-27 Studies in Rome ………………………………………………………………….…… 27-32 Boston and New York ……… …………………………………………………….…….… 33-41 California for the first time ……………………………………………………….……… 41-44 Bruderhof ………………………………………………………………………………. 44-50 San Francisco Conservatory of Music ……………… ……………………….….….. 50-58 San Francisco Tape Music Center ………………………………………………...…….. 58-70 Los Angeles …………………………………………………………………………...….. 70-72 San Francisco and Mills College ….…...…………………………………………..…... 72-77 Trips Festival ……………………...……………………………….………………...…….. 77-81 Brief retreat ………………………………………………………………………………. 81-84 Morning Star ………………………………………………………………...…………….. 84-87 Floating Lotus Opera Company ……….……………………………………………….. 88-90 Dousing for spirits …………………………………………………...……….…………. 90-94 Zero the Clown ……………………………………………...……………………….. 94-96 San Francisco Conservatory of Music / Ramon Sender Oral History 4 Mills Retrospective ……………………………………………………...….……………. 96-98 Creating sounds ….……………………………………………..………..………….. 98-105 Reflections and thoughts on electronic music today ……………….………………… 105-110 San Francisco Conservatory of Music / Ramon Sender Oral History 5 Monday, April 14, 2014 UPDIKE This is Tessa Updike and Mary Clare Brzytwa. We are with Ramon Sender at his home in San Francisco doing an interview for the Oral History Project at the Conservatory. Ramon, could you start by telling us where and when you were born? SENDER October 29th, 1934, at a woman’s lying-in clinic in Madrid, Spain. It was the month known historically as Red October because it was the month that the miners were striking in Asturias, and there was a sympathy strike in all the main cities. My father was not there, he was up north as a journalist covering the miners’ strike. So he doesn’t know the exact time I was born (so I’ve never been able to get a horoscope done). But he said probably the first sound I heard upon being born was machine gun fire, because there was a machine gun encampment outside the hospital. So I was born to the sound of machine gun fire, and probably thought, “What planet have I landed on?” This was also the first time the Moors had been back to Spain since Queen Isabella had kicked out the Muslims in 1492 because a young general named Francisco Franco had been brought in from Spanish Morocco to put down the strike. He brought in Moorish mercenaries, who were very, very cruel. They raped the women, killed the children, shot everybody, and basically reignited a hatred for the Moors that had been brewing for quite a while. So there – in a short paragraph, I was born. UPDIKE Could you tell us about your parents? SENDER My mother was trained as a concert pianist and grew up in a northwest part of old Castile, near the Portuguese border in a historic town called Zamora. My father was from a small village in the Pyrenees, in Aragón. He ran away from home as a seventeen-year-old to Madrid. And then was sent home, and came back again, older. He started writing for the newspapers. I’m not sure about the history of his time, but by the time he met my mother he was a journalist with a good reputation because he had written a novel that had won a prize. My mother had moved to Madrid because she was working for the phone company in Zamora – signing people up for phones (phones were sort of new). They moved her to Madrid where they had the big skyscraper called La Telefonica. She rented a little apartment on a small street near there. Then they went out on strike, and my father went to the strike meeting and met her. He asked her what she was doing for money, and so forth. She let it somehow be known that they were all pretty hard up because they didn’t have salaries. He said, “Well, I need a typist, would you type for me?” So they started meeting outside his little rented room where there was a plaza. They would meet there and transfer typed pages back and forth, and got to know each other. One day there was a knock on her door, and he was there and said, “Quick, let me come in, the cops San Francisco Conservatory of Music / Ramon Sender Oral History 6 are after me.” It turned out he had written an article the government didn’t like, and they were out looking to arrest him. So he went underground … I guess at her place. That’s when their relationship started. All of this, by the way, is in my book, Death in Zamora. Have you got a copy yet? I can give you one. Anyway, so that’s how they met. You know … I’m not sure if they met at the strike or at this club … there was a club called el Ateneo, where all the artists hung out. She used to play piano recitals there with a violinist. He may have known her from there, also. So then they started living together. Just as an aside – this is really strange. When Judy and I got married we went on our honeymoon to Spain, which was my first time back since I’d left as a two-year-old. The hotel we went to Judy’s parents recommended, because they had stayed there. It turned out this hotel was one and a half blocks from my father’s old rented room on one side and two blocks on the other side from an apartment he had rented with his brother, later.