Pauline Oliveros’ Bye Bye Butterfly (1965), composed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, is a real-time tape-delay collage work that typifies the humor in many of her compositions of that period, including pieces in which performers were called upon to produce absurd theatrical actions. Her later work, drawing on meditation processes, has been a most successful, and widely-copied, method of obtaining total integration of audience and performer. About Bye Bye Butterfly Oliveros writes: “This work is a two-channel tape composition (with an enclosure) made at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1965. It utilizes two Hewlett-Packard oscillators, two line amplifiers in cascade, one turntable with record, and two tape recorders in a delay setup. The composer arranged the equipment, tuned the oscillators, and played through the composition in real time.”
Though certainly not preplanned by the composer, this fine, improvised musical gem, composed by an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, symbolically bids farewell not only to the music of the nineteenth century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex. The title refers to the operatic disk which was at hand in the studio at the time and which was incorporated into the ongoing compositional mix.

Charles Amirkhanian, August 1977
Excerpt from the liner notes for New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media: Women in Electronic Music 1977. New World Records #80653-2 (p) 2006 © 2006 Anthology of Recorded Music Inc. Originally issued as CRI CD 728.
Used by permission.
Complete liner notes available at www.newworldrecords.org