Best Known As: Synthesizer performer of the album Switched-On Bach
Name at birth: Walter Carlos
Keyboardist and composer Wendy Carlos is a pioneer in electronic music, known popularly for her "switched-on" renditions of the music of classical composers. Carlos studied music and physics at Brown University, then studied at Columbia University and found work as a recording engineer in New York City. There she worked with inventor Robert Moog and began using one of his first keyboard synthesizers in the early 1960s. Carlos' first album, Switched-On Bach, was a smash success in 1968, winning three Grammy awards and staying on the classical music charts for more than 300 weeks. Carlos recorded other classical albums and provided music for feature films, including work with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. She has continued to compose, record and invent equipment, and is an avid fan of solar eclipses.
Switched-On Bach was based on the music of composer and organist Johann Sebastian Bach... Carlos was born as Walter Carlos and became Wendy Carlos after undergoing a sex-change procedure in the late 1960s, though her albums of that era were still released under the name of Walter Carlos. She has noted on her official site: "Politically incorrect fears and dissembling perpetuated a fictionalized identity including faked pictures, for 10 years (grrr...). I naively let them run amok, forced to hide from the public until 1979, when fed up, I pulled the plug on the whole mess"... The date of Switched-On Bach is sometimes misstated: the album was released in 1968 and won its three Grammy awards in 1969.
Composer Wendy Carlos spurred electronic music to new commercial heights during the late '60s, popularizing the synthesizer with the enormously successful Switched-On Bach album. Born in Pawtucket, RI, on November 14, 1939, Carlos pursued her M.A. in composition under Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening at Columbia University's famed Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Following her graduation, she moved to Manhattan, where she found work as a recording engineer. In Manhattan, she met Dr. Robert Moog and, not long afterward, she began playing the Moog synthesizer. Carlos released her first recording, Switched-On Bach, in 1968. A showcase for the Moog synthesizer, Switched-On Bach interpreted the legendary composer's most renowned fugues and movements via state of the art synth technology; purists were appalled, but the record captured the public's imagination and in time the album became the first classical record to be certified platinum by the RIAA. It also earned three Grammy Awards. A similar effort, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, followed in 1969. In 1971 Carlos introduced the vocoder -- an electronic device designed to synthesize the human voice. After 1976's Brandenburg Concertos 3-5, Carlos wrote the score for Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. Two years later, she wrote music for Tron, Disney's action movie about video games. Subsequent efforts included a spoof of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" recorded with "Weird" Al Yankovic and Switched-On Bach 2000. ~ Rovi
Born Walter Carlos on November 14, 1939, in Pawtucket, RI. Education: Brown University, bachelor's degree in music and physics, 1962; Columbia University, master's degree in music composition, 1965.
Began playing piano at age 6; studied music composition at Columbia University's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center; met Robert Moog, inventor of the modern synthesizer; recorded Switched-On Bach, 1968; composed film scores including A Clockwork Orange, 1972; The Shining, 1980; Tron, 1982; rereleased catalog on East Side Digital label, 1990s-2000s.
Awards: Grammy Awards, Album of the Year, Classical; Best Classical Performance, Instrumental Soloist or Soloists; Best Engineered Recording, Classical; all for Switched-On Bach, 1969.
Addresses:Record company—East Side Digital, P.O. Box 7367, Minneapolis, MN 55407, phone: (612) 375-0233, fax: (612) 375-9580, website: http://www.noside.com/esd/. Website—Wendy Carlos Official Website: http://www.wendycarlos.com.
Composer, pianist
One of the twentieth century's most accomplished classical musicians, Wendy Carlos has influenced modern music and its technology in countless ways. During her career she helped to develop the world's first electronic synthesizer and then, performing on the new instrument, recorded what was then the bestselling classical album of all time. After undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 1972, Carlos has since rewritten a great part of her history as a man.
Born Walter Carlos in 1939 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Carlos was the first of two children born to her working-class parents. By the age of six, Carlos was taking piano lessons, expressing a strong interest in both musical and scientific endeavors. Her first composition, Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano, was written at age 10, and at 14, she won a Westinghouse Science Fair scholarship for building her own computer. While her childhood accomplishments were tremendous, not all was well with Carlos; she struggled with confusion about her gender long before she had the faculties to understand her unique biological makeup.
Carlos finished high school and enrolled at Providence's Brown University to study music and physics in the late 1950s. During her tenure at Brown, Carlos discovered electronic music, and upon receiving her bachelor's degree in music and physics in 1962, she moved to New York City to complete her master's degree in music composition at Columbia University's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Under the tutelage of master electronic composers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, Carlos immersed herself in tape machines, oscillators, and any other electronic noise-making devices that she could find, often working late into the night on her compositions.
She made some rudimentary recordings with electronic oscillators at the school, and her contributions to the Columbia-Princeton Center's compilation record Electronic Music were panned when a review ran in The New York Times. "The least imaginative [selections] are the two pieces by the American, [Wendy] Carlos," wrote Howard Klein. "[S]he has followed a prevalent and bad example of combining so-called natural sounds with electronic ones."
After taking an editing job with the Gotham Recording company, Carlos befriended Robert Moog, a musical-instrument engineer who at the time was working on crafting an electronic synthesizer. Carlos began assisting Moog on his instrument, providing a much-needed musical perspective on its design. Upon the machine's completion in 1967, Columbia Records commissioned Carlos to record an all-Bach album using only the brand new Moog synthesizer.
Up to that point, electronic music had largely been relegated to academic and avant-garde art circles, never breaking into the mainstream. But with the help of Moog and producer Rachel Elkind, the album Switched-On Bach was born—and, along with it, electronic music as it is known today. Switched-On Bach won three Grammy awards and went on to become the best-selling classical record released up to that point. As well, it spawned a number of "Switched-On" imitators, flooding music stores in the late 1960s and early 1970s with torrents of electronics-drenched lounge records of varying artistic quality. In any event, the album cemented the Moog synthesizer's place in musical history and influenced a generation of electronic experimenters to come.
Focusing solely on studio work for the new few years, Carlos released more albums in the vein of Switched-On Bach, including Brandenburgs, Volumes 1 and 2 and The Well-Tempered Synthesizer. In 1971, Carlos began collaborating with Stanley Kubrick on another monumental work, the soundtrack to the film A Clockwork Orange. She worked with Kubrick again in 1980, on his classic horror film The Shining.
The following year, in 1972, Carlos underwent a sex change operation and became Wendy Carlos. When artists of the stature of Stevie Wonder and George Harrison, enamored of her pioneering musical work, came to meet her, she ignored their calls and more or less went into hiding. She took to low-profile outings such as eclipse chasing, during which she would be out of the spotlight, visiting far-off places like Siberia and Bali.
The influence of her new hobby showed through on an innovative 1972 Carlos recording, an ambient excursion entitled Sonic Seasonings. The album was Carlos's first original work and was composed in four movements representing the four seasons. Mixing synthesizers with nature sounds, Sonic Seasonings is considered one of the first recordings in the New Age genre. Fearing media reaction to her sex change, Carlos released this record, and others, as Walter Carlos.
The 1980s saw Carlos in a period of great experimentation, primarily in the developing field of digital technology. She composed the soundtrack to Disney Studios' visually innovative science fiction film Tron in 1982. A reviewer for Remix magazine described the influence Carlos's work on Tron exerted over the upand-coming electronic music scene: "[Tron] was one of the starting points for the digital futurism of techno and early electro, providing both visual and sonic markers for early rave and hip-hop cultures."
Carlos's 1984 release Digital Moonscapes featured orchestral sounds that were digitally replicated with computer synthesizers. As well, samplers and MIDI-controlled instruments worked their way into her studio and were especially evident on Carlos's 1988 collaboration with "Weird Al" Yankovic, a parodic send-up of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
While recording hardly any original music in the years to come, Carlos devoted herself seriously to the re-release, and in some cases rerecording, of her older work. In 1992, 25 years after its release, Carlos revisited Switched-On Bach with new technology. Using modern computer software she was able to achieve authentic Bach tunings, a feat unimaginable with 1960s technology. Almost all of her albums were reissued on the East Side Digital label. As many of the records were now out of print, music enthusiasts reveled in the chance to hear these discs re-mastered on CD.
East Side Digital put out a four-disc box set of all of Carlos's Switched-On recordings made from 1968 through 1980, and followed it up with a reissue of The Well-Tempered Synthesizer and with By Request, a collection of Carlos covers that had been requested by her fans. A Keyboard reviewer in 2001 praised the reissue of The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, pointing out that "the tasteful colors and imaginative interpretations are almost mesmerizing enough to make one forget what few of us realized at the time—how incredibly difficult this kind of electronic orchestration was on the primitive equipment she was using."
Despite the renewed interest in her older recordings, however, Carlos never quite reentered the music scene as an artist of current interest. While much of her pioneering work set the standard for all the electronic musicians who followed, her lack of original output after the 1980s eventually forced her into comparative obscurity.
Selected discography Switched-On Bach, Columbia, 1968. Switched-On Brandenburgs, Vol. 1, Columbia, 1969. Switched-On Brandenburgs, Vol. 2, Columbia, 1969. The Well-Tempered Synthesizer , Columbia, 1969. Sonic Seasonings, East Side Digital, 1972. (Soundtrack) A Clockwork Orange, East Side Digital, 1972. (Soundtrack) The Shining, Warner Bros., 1980. (Soundtrack) Tron, Disney, 1982. Digital Moonscapes, East Side Digital, 1984. Beauty in the Beast, East Side Digital, 1986. Secrets of Synthesis, East Side Digital, 1990. Switched-On Bach 2000, East Side Digital, 1995. Tales of Heaven & Hell, East Side Digital, 1998. Switched-On Boxed Set, East Side Digital, 1999. The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (with bonus tracks), East Side Digital, 2001. Switched-On Bach (with bonus tracks), East Side Digital, 2001. Switched-On Bach II, East Side Digital, 2001. Switched-On Brandenburgs, East Side Digital, 2001. By Request, East Side Digital, 2001.
Sources
Periodicals Keyboard, December 2001. New York Times, July 18, 1965. People, July 1, 1985.
Composer Wendy Carlos spurred electronic music to new commercial heights during the late '60s, popularizing the synthesizer with the enormously successful Switched-On Bach album. Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on November 14, 1939, Carlos pursued her M.A. in composition under Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening at Columbia University's famed Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Following her graduation, she moved to Manhattan, where she found work as a recording engineer. In Manhattan, she met Dr. Robert Moog and, not long afterward, she began playing the Moog synthesizer. Carlos released her first recording, Switched-On Bach, in 1968. A showcase for the Moog synthesizer, Switched-On Bach interpreted the legendary composer's most renowned fugues and movements via state-of-the-art synth technology; purists were appalled, but the record captured the public's imagination and in time became the first classical album certified platinum by the RIAA. It also earned three Grammy Awards. A similar effort, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, followed in 1969. In 1971, Carlos wrote the music for Stanley Kubrick's controversial film A Clockwork Orange, introducing the vocoder -- an electronic device designed to synthesize the human voice -- in her score. After 1976's Brandenburg Concertos 3-5, Carlos again worked with Kubrick, providing the score for his 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. Two years later, she wrote music for the Disney film Tron. Subsequent efforts included a spoof of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" recorded with Weird Al Yankovic and Switched-On Bach 2000. ~ All Music Guide, Rovi
Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos on November 14, 1939) is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to notice in the late 1960s (as Walter Carlos) with recordings made on the Moog synthesizer, then a relatively new and unknown instrument; most notable were LPs of synthesized Bach and the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Several years prior, two Carlos compositions using classical (pre-Moog) electronic techniques had been issued on LP (Variations for Flute and Tape and Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers). Although the first Carlos Moog albums were interpretations of the works of classical composers, she later resumed releasing original compositions. Carlos used the Synergy synthesizer,[1] one of the first polyphonic digital additive synthesizers.
Carlos' first release was entitled "Moog 900 Series – Electronic Music Systems" (R. A. Moog Company, Inc., 1967) and it was an introduction to the technical aspects of the machine.[2]
Switched-On Bach (1968) was an early album demonstrating the use of the synthesizer as a genuine musical instrument. As an early user of Robert Moog's first commercially available synthesizer modules (Moog assembled these as custom installations that differed greatly from user to user), Carlos helped pioneer the technology, which was significantly more difficult to use than it is today. Multitrack recording techniques played a critical role in the time-consuming process of creating this album. Switched-On Bach was the last project in a four-year-long collaboration with Benjamin Folkman and won gold records for both Carlos and Folkman. The album then became one of the first classical LPs to sell 500,000 copies, going gold in August 1969, and platinum in November 1986.[3]
Sonic Seasonings (1972) was packaged as a double album, with one side dedicated to each of the four seasons, and each side consisting of one long track. The album blended recorded sounds with synthesized sounds, occasionally employing melodies, to create an ambient effect. Not as popular as some other Carlos albums, it was influential on other artists who went on to create the ambient genre.[citation needed] In 1971, Carlos composed and recorded music for A Clockwork Orange. Portions of her work for this film in addition to its classical material re-appeared in her Tales of Heaven and Hell in 2003 in movement 3 A Clockwork Black. She worked with Stanley Kubrick again on the score for The Shining, though in the end Kubrick mostly used pre-existing music cues by other composers.
In 1982, she scored the film Tron for The Walt Disney Company. This score incorporated orchestra, chorus, organ, and both analog and digital synthesizers. Some of her end-title music featuring the Royal Albert Hall Organ was replaced with a song by Journey, and the music that originally was composed for the lightcycle scene was dropped. Digital Moonscapes (1984) switched to digital synthesizers from the analog synthesizers that were the trademark of her earlier albums. Some of the unused material from the Tron soundtrack was incorporated into it.
Beauty in the Beast (1986) saw Carlos experimenting with various tunings, including just intonation, Balinese scales and several scales she invented for the album. One of her scales, the Harmonic Scale, involved setting a "root note", and retuning all of the notes on the keyboard to just intonation intervals from the root note. There are a total of 144 possible notes per octave in this system: 12 notes in a chromatic scale times 12 different keys. Other scales included Carlos' Alpha, Beta & Gamma scales, which experimented with dividing the octave into a non-integral number of equally-spaced intervals. These explorations in effect supplemented the more systematic microtonal studies of the composer Easley Blackwood, Jr., whose etudes on all twelve equal-tempered scales between 13 and 24 notes per octave had appeared in 1980.
Secrets of Synthesis (1987) is a lecture by Carlos with audio examples (many from her own recordings), expounding on topics she feels to be of importance. Some of the material is an introduction to synthesis, and some (e.g., a discussion of hocket) is aimed at experienced musicians.
Beginning in 1998, all of her catalogue was remastered. In 2005, the two-volume set Rediscovering Lost Scores was released, featuring previously out-of-print material, including the unreleased soundtrack to Woundings, and music composed and recorded for The Shining, Tron and A Clockwork Orange that was not used in the films.
Personal life
Carlos was born as Walter Carlos in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and began musical education at age six with piano lessons. Following undergraduate studies of music and physics at Brown University accompanied by early explorations of electronic music, Carlos earned a master's degree in composition at Columbia University, studying there with Vladimir Ussachevsky, a pioneer in electronic music (other teachers included Otto Luening and Jack Beeson).
Remaining in New York after graduation, Carlos met Dr. Robert Moog and was one of his earliest customers, providing feedback for his further development of the Moog synthesizer. Carlos convinced Moog to add touch sensitivity to the synthesizer keyboard, to allow a greater level of dynamics and musicality.[4]
Around 1966, Carlos met Rachel Elkind, who went on to produce Switched-On Bach and other early albums. With the proceeds of Switched-On Bach, the two renovated a New York brownstone, which they shared as a home and business premises, installing a studio for live and electronic recording on the bottom floor. Carlos took the unusual step of enclosing the entire studio in a Faraday cage, shielding the equipment from radio and television interference.[5]
The artist's first recordings were released under the name Walter Carlos. Carlos underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1972[6] after living as a woman beginning in May 1968. Her album By Request (1975) featured the name "Walter", and the first release credited to her as "Wendy" was Switched-On Brandenburgs (1979). (The earlier albums have since been re-released under the Wendy Carlos name.) Carlos' first public appearance after her gender transition was in an interview in the May 1979 issue of Playboy magazine. In it, she states "I was about five or six...I remember being convinced I was a little girl, much preferring long hair and girls clothes, and not knowing why my parents didn't see it clearly".[7] Carlos chose to be interviewed in Playboy because "The magazine has always been concerned with liberation, and I'm anxious to liberate myself", but she later came to regret the decision because of the unwelcome publicity it brought to her personal life, notably in Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, where her surgery was described in anatomical detail. On her official site, her transition is discussed in an essay stating that she values her privacy on the subject.[8]
In 1998, Carlos sued the songwriter/artist Momus for $22 million[9] for his satirical song "Walter Carlos" (which appeared on the album The Little Red Songbook), which suggested that if Wendy could go back in time she could marry Walter. The case was settled out of court, with Momus agreeing to remove it from the CD and owing $30,000 in legal fees.[10]
(Albums released during years 1965–1975 were originally released under name "Walter Carlos". Later albums and all re-issues have been released under the name "Wendy Carlos".)
Sonic Seasonings+ (1998) (Compiles the original album together with an outtake, and the previously unreleased 1986 composition Land of the Midnight Sun)
Switched-On Boxed Set (1999) (Compiles all three Switched-On albums and "The Well-Tempered Synthesizer" together
Rediscovering Lost Scores, Volume 1 (2005) (Compiles previously unreleased music from The Shining, A Clockwork Orange and several UNICEF films)
Rediscovering Lost Scores, Volume 2 (2005) (Compiles previously unreleased music from The Shining, Tron, Split Second, Woundings and 2 Dolby tests.)
Appears on
Electronic Music (1965) LP. Vox Turnabout. Includes two compositions by Walter Carlos: Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (with Phillip Ramey, pianist) and Variations for Flute and Tape (with John Heiss, flutist).
Moog 900 Series – Electronic Music Systems (1967) (Demonstration disc displaying the capabilities of the first commercially available Moog synthesizer)
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