Ramón Sender (composer)

Sender attended the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome and Columbia University in New York, where he studied with Henry Cowell.

After the residents' homes were bulldozed by Sonoma County authorities three times, he moved into the Wheeler Ranch[1] in Occidental, California.

[11] One of the residents at Wheeler at Ranch was Alicia Bay Laurel, a visual artist, author and singer-songwriter known for her 1970 best-seller Living on the Earth.

During the late 1970s, Sender was one of the founding members of The Occidental Community Choir (the nearest town to the Wheeler Ranch commune), for whom he wrote original music and shared his skills as a choral arranger.

In 2006, stage producer, arranger and bassist Nicholas Alva created a musical based on the story of the open land communes Morningstar and Wheeler Ranch, including songs by Sender.

After the death of Sender's daughter Xaverie in 1989, he founded the Peregrine Foundation (for people "living in or exiting from experimental social groups").

Sender identifies himself as a "transcendental, post-monotheist hippie pagan sun worshipper, with one foot planted in the nondual teaching of Julie Henderson[20] and the other in the Archaic Revival culture".

[22] In 1989, Sender published A Death in Zamora, a book investigating the execution of his mother by Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War.

The book has been recognized not only as a valuable record of the Spanish Civil War, but as a historical account of early feminism and rebellion against patriarchy in Spain, of which his mother, Amparo Barayón, was a pioneer.