San Francisco Tape Music Festival 2019 Plans

Poster design for the 2019 festival (from the festival Web site)

Once again the new year will be celebrated by the annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival. This remains one of the best opportunities in the United States to enjoy the performance of synthesized audio compositions projected into a three-dimensional space. That space is configured with 24 high-end loudspeakers; and, for many of the performances, the projection of the audio sources onto those speakers is controlled in real-time. The results are experienced by the audience sitting in total darkness.

Next month’s program will be somewhat of a landmark. By 1969 (half a century ago!) electronic music was finally beginning to work its way into the mainstream; and much of the content resulted from imaginative approaches to recording and editing, what we now call “tape music.” The Beatles had much to do with this change in public consciousness, particularly through “Revolution 9,” one of the tracks on their album The Beatles, which became better known as the “White Album.” “Revolution 9” was a sound collage created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from George Harrison and Yoko Ono and most likely inspired by tape-based creations by composers such as Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

1969 was also the year when Columbia’s Switched-On Bach record, created by Wendy (then Walter) Carlos, hit the top of the Billboard Classical Albums chart, a position that it held until 1972. In this case the tape music techniques involved the post-processing of electronically synthesized sounds from a Moog synthesizer. 1969 also saw the rise of Morton Subotnick, whose tape music techniques provided the electronic accompaniment for Leon Kirchner’s third string quartet, which won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Music. 1969 was the year of Subotnick’s pioneering surround-sound tape composition “Touch.”

(For the record, my own first venture into tape music took place in 1969. One of my colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory had imported from Stanford University the code behind John Chowning’s frequency modulation approach to sound synthesis. He installed it on a recently-arrived PDP-10 in such a way that the synthesis software could be “played” by a bank of switches on the console. My colleague and I “improvised” enough sounds to fill a reel of magnetic tape, which I then took to the studios of the campus radio station, whose call letters at that time happened to be WTBS. I used the tape drives there to experiment with playing samples at different speeds, both forward and reverse. The result was a composition of about twenty minutes’ duration entitled “Lemniscate,” which was then used by choreographer Dorothy Vislocky for her ballet “Objects.”)

As in the past, the festival schedule will consist of four concerts over the course of a single weekend. Specific dates and times will be as follows:

• Friday, January 4, 9 p.m.
• Saturday, January 5, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, January 5, 10:30 p.m.
• Sunday, January 6, 8 p.m.

Details about the specific compositions to be performed at each of these concerts have not yet been released. (Those details were added to last year’s version of this article when they became available.)

[added 12/22, 3 p.m.: Program details have now been announced as follows:

Friday January 4, 2019 (9 p.m.)
JAMES TENNEY - For Ann, Rising (1969)
FRANÇOIS BAYLE - Solitioude (from L’Expérience Acoustique, 1969)
HORACIO VAGGIONE - Consort for Convolved Violins (2011)
THOM BLUM - That which goes unnamed (2018)
BRENDAN GLASSON - Here I Will Teach You How To (2018)
MAIJA HYNNINEN - It is always today (2015)
KRISTIN MILTNER - Untitled (2018)
CHRISTOPHER CHANDLER - from these old roots (2017)
MIKE FRENGEL - Sarteano, l'estate (2012)
ADAM STANOVIĆ - Foundry Flux (2016)


Saturday January 5, 2019 (8 p.m.)
THE BEATLES - Revolution 9 (1968)
JON APPLETON - Newark Airport Rock (1969)
ALISTAIR MACDONALD - Final Times (1998)
ANNETTE VANDE GORNE - Figures d’espace (2004)
CLIFF CARUTHERS - New Work (2018)
HEADLIGHTS (DEREK GEDALECIA and AURORA JOSEPHSON) - Tape Music for Children (2018)
KENT JOLLY - Tightrope (2018)
MAGGI PAYNE - Quicksilver (2011)
BRIAN REINBOLT - Unintentional Garden (2018)
JASON BOLTE - AridFlow (2017)
AKI PASOULAS - Irides (2017)
ELI STINE - No Where (2018)


Saturday January 5, 2019 (10:30 p.m.)
ELIANE RADIGUE - Stress-Osaka (1969)
GILLES GOBEIL - Le miroir triste (2007)
KRIS FORCE - Auric Blade (2018)
ROB HAMILTON - One who lives near the olive tree (2017)
LARRY POLANSKY - Glass (2018)
RAUB ROY - QTπ (2018)
ANTHONY DI FURIA - Piano Selvatico (Wild Plane) (2016)


Sunday January 6, 2019 (8 p.m.)
MORTON SUBOTNICK - Touch (1969)
BERNARD PARMEGIANI - excerpts from Du Pop À L'âne (1969) and Pop’éclectic (1969)
ANTHONY GNAZZO - Population Explosion (1969)
DARREN COPELAND - while working and walking (2016)
HANES/ADAMS (STEVE ADAMS and JOHN HANES) - Two Improvisations (2018)
MATT INGALLS - poem (2013)
FERNANDO LOPEZ-LEZCANO - Hot’n Cold (1991)
ZURIÑE F GERENABARRENA - Fyr (2016)]

All performances will take place in the Victoria Theatre, located in the Mission at 2961 16th Street, one block east of the 16th Street BART Station and the Muni bus stops on the corner of Mission Street. General admission will be $20 for each concert with a special $10 rate for balcony seating and for the underemployed. The one exception will be the 10:30 p.m. show on Saturday, which will be free to all. As in the past, there will be a festival pass sold for all four concerts for $50. Tickets will be available at the door after 7 p.m. on each of the three days of the festival, and only cash will be accepted. Brown Paper Tickets has created a Web page for advance ticket purchases for both individual concerts (using a pull-down menu to select the date) and the festival pass.