Wendy Carlos

Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos, November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer known for electronic music and film scores.

Born and raised in Rhode Island, Carlos studied physics and music at Brown University before moving to New York City in 1962 to study music composition at Columbia University. Studying and working with various electronic musicians and technicians at the city's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, she helped in the development of the Moog synthesizer, Robert Moog's first commercially available keyboard instrument.

Carlos came to prominence with Switched-On Bach (1968), an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach performed on a Moog synthesizer, which helped popularize its use in the 1970s and won her three Grammy Awards. Its commercial success led to several more albums, including further synthesized classical music adaptations, and experimental and ambient music. She composed the score to two Stanley Kubrick films, A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980), and for Tron (1982) for Walt Disney Productions.

In 1979, Carlos raised public awareness of transgender issues by disclosing she had been living as a woman since at least 1968, and in 1972 had undergone gender-affirming surgery.

, much of Carlos's discography is out of print, and has not been licensed for digital distribution to streaming or download platforms.

Early life

Carlos was born on November 14, 1939 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to working-class parents Clarence and Mary Carlos. Her parents married in 1937, and Carlos was the first of two children. and wrote her first composition, "A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano", at age ten.

Carlos attended St. Raphael Academy, a Catholic high school in Pawtucket. In 1953, at fourteen, Carlos won a scholarship by building a computer presented at the Westinghouse Science Fair, a science competition for high-school students. From 1958 to 1962, Carlos studied at Brown University and graduated with a degree in music and physics, during which she taught informal lessons in electronic music. She called it "a really lovely occupation" and found it a useful learning experience. Moog recounted that Carlos gave extensive and very detailed constructive criticism about his equipment, presenting him with suggestions for improvements to every module, including the shapes and dimensions of the cases. Moog credited Carlos with originating many features of his synthesizer, and that many features that became part of the final production model of the Moog synthesizer originated with the custom modules he created for her, including the touch-sensitive keyboard, a portamento control, a fixed filter bank, and a 49-oscillator polyphonic generator bank that could create chords and arpeggios.

By 1966 Carlos owned a small Moog synthesizer, which she used to record sound effects and jingles for television commercials, which earned her "anywhere from $100 to $1000".

Carlos recorded several compositions in the 1960s as a student at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Two of them were re-recorded and released on By Request (1975), Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963) and Episodes for Piano and Electronic Sound (1964), both featuring Phillip Ramey on piano. A third, Variations for Flute and Electronic Sounds (1964, featuring John Heiss on flute) was recorded and released in 1965 on a Turnabout Records "Electronic Music" compilation. Other known, but unreleased student compositions include "Episodes for Piano and Tape" (1964), "Pomposities for Narrator and Tape" (1965), and "Noah" (1965), a two-hour opera blending electronics with an orchestra. Carlos's first commercial release was Moog 900 Series – Electronic Music Systems (1967), an introduction to the technical aspects of the Moog synthesizer released as a nine-minute single-sided mono LP and narrated by Ed Stokes.

Part of her compensation for making the recording was in Moog equipment, and in part payment for her various other contributions to Moog's product development, and for articles she wrote for Moog's short-lived electronic music periodical, she was able to acquire additional Moog equipment at a discount, most of it custom-designed to her specific requirements. Switched-On Bach became an unexpected commercial and critical hit, with Glenn Gould calling it "the album of the decade", and it helped to draw attention to the synthesizer as a genuine musical instrument. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program in November 1968, called CBC AM, secured a rare interview with Carlos about the selection and use of Moog. As biographer Amanda Sewell observes, it is notable that Carlos is not pictured anywhere on the album, and is only mentioned by name (as Walter Carlos) in the rear sleeve notes of the original cover. Newsweek dedicated a full page to Carlos with the caption "Plugging into the Steinway of the future". Carlos performed selections from the album on stage with a synthesizer with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.

The massive and unexpected success of Switched-On Bach put great pressure on Carlos. She was by this time well into her gender confirmation process, and she was fearful of both personal ridicule and physical attack, and of the negative impact that her status as a transitioning person could have on her music career. Biographer Amanda Sewell records that the St. Louis appearance was extremely difficult for her—she hated having to disguise herself as Walter, for which she had to affect a deeper voice, use makeup to simulate a five o'clock shadow, and don a wig and pasted-on fake sideburns. Her childhood experiences of being bullied and assaulted made her so fearful of appearing in public that she reportedly even contemplated taking her own life before the event and cried all the way to St. Louis.

This was to be one of only two live performances Carlos made following her days as a student, the other being with the Kurzweil Baroque Ensemble for "Bach at the Beacon" in 1997.

In 1970, the album won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist or Soloists (With or Without Orchestra), and Best Engineered Classical Recording. Carlos released a follow-up, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, with synthesized pieces from multiple composers. Released in November 1969, the album reached No. 199 on the Billboard 200 and received two Grammy nominations. The success of both albums allowed Carlos to move into Elkind's more spacious New York City home in 1971.

1970s

After the release of Switched-On Bach, Carlos was invited to compose the soundtrack of two science fiction films, Marooned (1969), directed by John Sturges, and A Clockwork Orange (1971), directed by Stanley Kubrick. When the directors of Marooned changed their minds about including a soundtrack, Carlos chose to work with Kubrick, as she and Elkind were fans of his previous films, adding: "We finally wound up talking with someone who had a close connection to Stanley Kubrick's lawyer. We suddenly got an invitation to fly to London." Before Carlos knew about the offer, she read the book and began writing a piece based on it named "Timesteps". A soundtrack containing only the film cuts of the score was released as Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange in 1972, combining synthesized and classical music by Henry Purcell, Beethoven and Gioacchino Rossini with an early use of a vocoder. Later that year, Carlos released an album of music not included in the final score titled Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange, which peaked on the Billboard 200 chart at No. 146. Carlos later described the project as "a lot of fun ... a pleasurable venture". It combined field recordings of animals and nature with synthesized sounds, occasionally employing melodies, to create soundscapes. It reached No. 168 in the Billboard 200 and influenced other artists who went on to pursue the ambient and new-age genres in later years.

By 1973, Columbia/CBS Records had received a considerable number of requests for Carlos to produce another album of synthesized classical music. She agreed to the request, opting to produce a sequel to Switched-On Bach, which began with her and Elkind seeking compositions that were most suitable for the synthesizer; the two picked selections from Suite No. 2 in B minor, Two-Part Inventions in A minor and major, Suite from Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, and Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major. The latter features a Yamaha E-5 Electone organ for certain passages, as a reliable polyphonic keyboard had not been developed. The result, Switched-On Bach II, was released in 1973 and sold over 70,000 copies in the US during the first five weeks of its release.

Following Switched-On Bach II, Carlos changed musical directions once more. In 1971, she and Elkind had asked Columbia Records to attach a pre-paid business reply card in each new pressing of her albums, which resulted in a considerable amount of suggestions from the public regarding the subject of her future releases. The ideas received were divided; some asked for more classical adaptations, while others wanted more of Carlos's original compositions. Carlos decided, "If I was going to spend months for mere minutes of music, I certainly wasn't going to be pigeonholed into only retreading existing music", and so began a process of "re-directing new ideas, reworking old ones". By mid-1974, Carlos and Elkind had selected tracks of varying styles to record on the Moog synthesizer, which Carlos found liberating, as it demonstrated the flexibility of the instrument. Released as By Request in 1975, the album includes pieces from Bach, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, two of Carlos's compositions from the 1960s, and renditions of "Eleanor Rigby" by The Beatles and "What's New Pussycat?", originally sung by Tom Jones.

By Request was followed by Switched-On Brandenburgs, a double album containing all six of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos played on a synthesizer, in 1980.

1980s

Carlos reunited with Kubrick to compose the score for his psychological horror film The Shining (1980). Before filming began, Carlos and Elkind read the book, as per Kubrick's suggestion, for musical inspiration. Carlos recorded a complete electronic score for the film, but Kubrick ended up using mostly existing recordings by several avant-garde composers, tracks that he had used as guide tracks during editing. Carlos and Elkind did not discover this until they were invited to a screening of the film in May 1980, and they were reportedly furious about Kubrick's actions. Their experience closely mirrored that of composer Alex North, who had written and recorded a complete orchestral soundtrack for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but discovered at the film's world premiere that Kubrick had jettisoned the entire score in favour of the guide tracks he had used while editing the movie.

The Shining (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), released in 1980 on Warner Bros. Records, featured only two tracks credited to Carlos and Elkind: the main title theme and "Rocky Mountains", the former a reinterpretation of the "Dies Irae" section of Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz. Biographer Amanda Sewell discovered that Carlos and Elkind's agent Lucy Kroll had written a note in her files indicating that the duo had initially considered suing Kubrick, but Sewell found that, several pages further on, Kroll had written another note that read "No signed contract"—Carlos and Elkind had made the deal with Kubrick "on a handshake", and thus had no legal recourse. Some of Carlos's music had some legal issues regarding its release, but much of it was made available in 2005 as part of her two-volume compilation album Rediscovering Lost Scores.

With work on The Shining complete, Elkind ended her long-time collaboration with Carlos when she moved to France with her husband in 1980. Carlos remained in New York City, sharing a converted loft in Greenwich Village with her new business partner Annemarie Franklin. It housed her new, remodeled studio, which was enclosed in a Faraday cage to shield the equipment from interference by radio, television and AC power-line signals.

Carlos's first project with Franklin began around 1980, when The Walt Disney Company asked her to record the soundtrack to its science fiction feature Tron (1982). Carlos agreed, but was not interested in composing solely with electronic music, as she wished to incorporate an orchestra with her musical ideas. She recalled their demands were "tightly specified ... there wasn't a lot of elbow room, and that made it fun". Tron: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was released in 1982 and reached No. 135 on the Billboard 200. Carlos intended to release her scores on her own album, but Columbia/CBS showed a lack of interest in the prospect. The album features the first instance of a 35-note octave.

In 1988, CBS Records asked Carlos to collaborate with comical musician "Weird Al" Yankovic to release a parody of Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. Carlos agreed to the project, as she felt it presented a chance "to let your sense of humor out of the cage". Released in October 1988, Peter and the Wolf/Carnival of the Animals—Part II was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Album for Children in 1989.

1990s–2000s

To mark the 25th anniversary of Switched-On Bach, Carlos re-recorded the album with her set of digital instruments and recording techniques. Released in 1992 on Telarc Records, Switched-On Bach 2000 took roughly one and a half years to produce; Carlos estimated around 3,000 hours were invested in the project, which involved using several digital audio workstation software packages, including Pro Tools. A Moog synthesizer is only used once on the record; the rest is performed on 13 modern synthesizers. The album also marked her first venture into mixing in Dolby Surround sound.

Carlos wrote the soundtrack to the British film Brand New World (1998), also known as Woundings, directed by Roberta Hanley and based on a play by Jeff Noon. Carlos explained the style of her music: "I was given fairly large carte blanche to do some horrific things and also some inside-psyche mood paintings, and that's what the film became."

Beginning in 1998, Carlos digitally remastered her studio albums, culminating in the Switched-On Box Set released in 1999 featuring her four synthesized classical albums.

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 recorded for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron that was not used in the films.

Personal life

Gender transition

Carlos became aware of her gender dysphoria at an early age, recalling: "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". While at Brown, she went on a date with a girl and felt "so jealous of her I was beside myself". That created some problems for Carlos when Switched-On Bach became an unexpected hit after its release in October 1968.

Prior to a live performance of excerpts from the album with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Carlos was apprehensive about appearing in public. She put on fake sideburns and a man's wig, and drew on facial hair with an eyebrow pencil to appear more masculine. She did the same thing again when she met Kubrick, and for an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970. although for marketing reasons she released two more albums as Walter Carlos (1973's Switched-On Bach II and 1975's By Request). The case was settled out of court, with Momus agreeing to remove the song from subsequent editions of the CD and owing $30,000 in legal fees.

Published biography

A biography by musicologist Amanda Sewell, Wendy Carlos: A Biography, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. It relies entirely on published publicly available sources, since the author was unable to secure an interview with Carlos or anyone close to her. Despite this limitation it was positively reviewed by critics. On her personal website, Carlos describes the work as "fiction" that mischaracterizes her life and deceased parents.

Awards and honors

Switched-On Bach was the winner of three Grammy Awards at the 1970 ceremony:

Album of the Year, Classical
Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist Or Soloists (With Or Without Orchestra)
Best Engineered Recording, Classical

Carlos received three additional nominations for Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist Or Soloists (With Or Without Orchestra) and Best Engineered Recording, Classical for The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, and Best Recording for Children for Peter And The Wolf/Carnival Of The Animals (Part II).

Carlos is the first transgender recipient of a Grammy Award.

Other activities

Carlos contributed a review of the then-available synthesizers to the June 1971 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, contrasting the Moog, Buchla and Tonus (a.k.a. ARP) systems. She was dismissive of smaller systems like the EMS Putney and the Minimoog as "toys" and "cash-ins".

Carlos is also an accomplished solar eclipse photographer. Her work has been published online by NASA and has appeared on the cover of Sky & Telescope. She has developed various techniques for the extension of dynamic range in eclipse photography by the use of darkroom techniques and digital composites.

In addition, Carlos' hobbies include creating map projections, most notably a novel type of conformal map.

Discography

Studio albums

Switched-On Bach (1968)
The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969)
Sonic Seasonings (1972)
Walter Carlos's Clockwork Orange (1972; reissued in 1998 as A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score)
Switched-On Bach II (1973)
By Request (1975)
Switched-On Brandenburgs (1980)
Digital Moonscapes (1984)
Beauty in the Beast (1986)
Secrets of Synthesis (1987)
Peter & the Wolf (1988; with "Weird Al" Yankovic)
Switched-On Bach 2000 (1992)
Tales of Heaven and Hell (1998)

Soundtracks

A Clockwork Orange (1971)
The Shining (1980)
Tron (1982)
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 two Dolby demonstration tracks)

Compilations

Switched-On Brandenburgs, Vol. I (1987; comprises the first LP of Switched-On Brandenburgs (1979) and selections from Switched-On Bach II (1973))
Switched-On Brandenburgs, Vol. II (1987; comprises the second LP of Switched-On Brandenburgs (1979), selections from Switched-On Bach II (1973), and Bach's "Little" Fugue in G minor, BWV 578 from By Request (1975))
Switched-On Boxed Set (1999; compiles Switched-On Bach, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Switched-On Bach II and Switched-On Brandenburgs)

Appears on

Electronic Music (1967) from Vox Turnabout. Includes two Carlos compositions "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 of the capabilities of the first commercially available Moog synthesizer
Childe Harold – "Brink of Death" / "Anne, With Love" (single, 1968, Limelight Records)

References

Source

External links

as Walter
as Wendy