LaMonte Young spent his childhood in a log cabin in Idaho, raised by a Mormon sheep-herder, learning to play the saxophone from a relative who conducted a brass band. In 1949 the family moved to Los Angeles, and Young got a formal musical education studying serialism in 1951 at the Los Angeles Conservatory, in 1953 at Los Angeles City College (here under Arnold Schoenberg's former collaborator Leonard Stein) and in 1957 at UCLA, all the while playing in jazz bands and meeting future jazz greats like Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman. Nonetheless, he started composing high-brow classical music, which, however, broke new ground because of his passion for very long tones, starting with his "Octet for Brass" (1957). In 1958 he moved to UC Berkeley, spent a summer in Germany at the court of electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, where he also met John Cage disciples, and, upon returning to Berkeley, became friends with fellow student Terry Riley. Somehow the marriage of jazz, serialism, electronic music and indeterminacy yielded the music that came to be called "Minimalism".

Meanwhile, Robert Erickson was promoting improvisation in his composition classes at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In 1961 one of his students, Ramon Sender, composed "Four Sanskrit Hymns" for three magnetic tapes, four sopranos and chamber ensemble. That piece marked the birth of San Francisco's electronic music. In December 1961 Sender and fellow student Pauline Oliveros (a queer Chicana) launched a series of concerts called "Sonics" of tape-based compositions, including one by Terry Riley, who was studying at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley.

They were all influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen's tape piece Gesang der Junglinge (1956). In 1962 Sender and Morton Subotnick (also a Mills College student) started the San Francisco Tape Music Center, with an electronic studio located on the third floor of a building shared with radio station KPFA and Anna Halprin's Workshop. Their concerts were supported by Al Frankenstein, art critic for “The Chronicle”, and often consisted in collaborations with poets, visual artists and avantgarde groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Anna Halprin's Workshop. Subotnick indulged in chaotic live electronic music, thanks to Berkeley-based hobbyist Don Buchla, who built custom electronic synthesizers. In November 1964 Terry Riley debuted his "In C", a landmark composition of minimalism, while Oliveros improvised her feminist electronic poem "Bye Bye Butterfly" in 1965 and Steve Reich discovered the "phasing" technique with his apocalyptic "It's Gonna Rain" also in 1965. In 1966 the Tape Music Center became part of Mills College, and its pioneers parted ways: Sender joined the commune Morning Star Ranch, established in 1966 by former folksinger and comedian Lou Gottlieb north of San Francisco; Subotnick moved to New York, where he recorded "Silver Apples of the Moon" (1967) for Buchla synthesizer, the first electronic piece to be composed specifically for an LP; Oliveros went to UC San Diego where she organized Buddhist-inspired "Sonic Meditations" (1970) for a women-only ensemble to stimulate what she later called "deep listening"; Steve Reich moved to New York where, influenced by African music, gamelan and Free Jazz, he refined the phrasing technique in the monumental "Drumming" (1971). Their friend LaMonte Young was already in New York, a driving force of the budding Fluxus movement and promoting very spiritual droning music with his Theatre of Eternal Music. Terry Riley joined him in 1965 and went on to record "A Rainbow In Curved Air" in 1968, utilizing eight-track recording technology pioneered in Los Angeles by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys in 1966.

The experimental music of the Bay Area was, like its literature, representative of an alternative and anti-conformist culture, of a rejection of traditional values, of an iconoclastic spirit of innovation. It originated from the spirit of the eccentric independent, indifferent to established rules and traditions.

Tony Martin also injected into concerts the light show, pioneered by Seymour Locks and Elias Romero, into the artistic mix of the Tape Music Center. Seymour Locks' improvisational light shows were an early influence on trumpet player Stan Shaff and electrical engineer Doug McEachern. Starting in 1963, these two crafted public three-dimensional electronic sound events and in 1967 established the sound theatre Audium that played Shaff's tape compositions. The light show spread to New York (where Danny Williams animated Andy Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable", that also staged a sensational act in San Francisco in May 1966), to Seattle (notably Don Paulson's "Lux Sit & Dance" and Ron McComb's "Union Light Company", both formed after a November 1966 concert held by community-based radio station KRAB) and to Los Angeles (the Single Wing Turquoise Bird troupe in 1968).

The prolific choreographer Carlos Carvajal, originally a folk dancer in Madelynne Greene's folk dance groups and a classical dancer in the San Francisco Ballet, created "Totentanz" (1967), his master's thesis from San Francisco State University, with a soundtrack of electronic music composed by Warner Jepson (perhaps the first electronic soundtrack of a ballet) and "Genesis 70" (1970), a ballet set to Terry Riley's "In C".

The electronic musicians were influenced more by jazz improvisation than by classical composition. John Coltrane, one of the pioneers of Free Jazz, who had just recorded the groundbreaking album "A Love Supreme", played twice at the Jazz Workshop in North Beach in September 1965 and January 1966, leaving behind a cult following (and picking up tenor saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders from Oakland). Young Black people saw his passionate and fiery collective improvisations as a musical counterpart to the "Black Power" movement. Coltrane, however, was a pacifist who experienced a spiritual awakening in San Francisco. Coltrane died young in 1967. His wife Alice converted to Hinduism and founded a Hindu temple near Malibu.

Alto saxophonist Sonny Simmons, raised in Oakland, indulged in the lengthy improvisations/compositions for free-jazz quintet on "Stayin' On The Watch" (1966), "Music From The Spheres" (1966) and "Expanded Universe" (1971).