Ramón Sender

Ramón Sender (Madrid, 1934) is a composer of Spanish origin associated with the American musical avant-garde. Born in Madrid on 29 October 1934, he trained in New York with George Copeland (piano) and Elliott Carter between 1948 and 1951, then studied at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome and at Columbia University, where his teacher was Henry Cowell. He completed his training with Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory (1959–1962) and with Darius Milhaud at Mills College.

In 1961, together with Morton Subotnick, he founded and directed the Tape Music Center in San Francisco, a collective of composers that operated until 1966 and whose members included Buchla and Oliveros. That same year, with Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand, he co-produced the Trips Festival in San Francisco, an event that reportedly influenced popular and experimental works of the following decade. His interest in spirituality led him to explore chants and functional songs composed collectively, and to co-found the Morning Star Ranch in Occidental, California, where he taught yoga, meditation and music between 1966 and 1980.

His works are often mixed-media and resist traditional classification. The Tropical Fish Opera (1962) places four performers around an aquarium with drawn staves, who improvise from the paths of the fish. Desert Ambulance (1964), one of his best-known pieces, uses a three-track tape, two tracks of which reach the audience in stereo and the third only the performer, along with pitches, timing indications and spoken instructions.

Sender also wrote the novel Zero Weather (1980), considered by some accounts the first interactive novel based on hypertext, as well as numerous essays and manifestos on subjects ranging from experimental tuning systems to theories about the types of clown. His legacy lies in his role as a bridge between electronic music, performance and the experimental communities of California.