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Today’s post is another “Unsung Hero” inventor. You know how people come along and you hear about them and know their names but you don’t know where you know them from? Wendy Carlos is one of those people.
Wendy Carlos is responsible for what we know today as the “synthesizer.” Her work was on a Moog modular Synthesizer. It was fully analog and for her to get the correct sound, she had to change out wires on the boards and turn a bunch of knobs. See below a video Carlos did for BBC demonstrating how she was able to make the music she did.
Carlos’s high standards and industrious work ethic began in her childhood. Born in 1939 into a working-class Rhode Island family, her music-loving parents couldn’t afford a piano: her father drew a keyboard on paper so she could practise between lessons. She built a hi-fi system for her parents by cutting wood and soldering wire and won a science contest at 14 by inventing a computer. She then made her first tape machine for music-making, after falling in love with the early electronic music of Pierre Henry and Bebe Barron.
By the time she found Robert Moog napping on a banquette at a New York audio conference in 1964, she was a music and physics graduate of Brown and Columbia. Moog soaked up her suggestions for sound filter banks and pitch-sliding controls, which became original features of his synthesiser; Carlos also wanted a touch-sensitive keyboard, not standard on the instrument until the late 1970s.
‘She made music jump into 3D’: Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius by Jude Rogers, Nov. 11, 2020, The Guardian
Carlos began an illustrious career as a synthesizer prodigy. The mixing of computers and keyboards to make music made her record an album entitled “Switched-On Bach” in 1968.
In collaboration with Rachel Elkind, who served as her producer for a dozen years, Carlos hit platinum sales status with her 1968 recording Switched-On Bach, which propelled the Moog synthesizer into the public consciousness and won three Grammy Awards.
Click Play to hear a few samples from Switched-on Bach!
Her sophomore album “Well Tempered Synthesizer” was a success with the addition of the vocoder for synthesized singing.
Carlos began scoring films and gained the attention of famed director Stanley Kubrick.
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.”[32] 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.
Wendy Carlos, Wikipedia, Last updated: June 12, 2024
If you don’t know her from that, you definitely know her from The Shining. The main title and “Rocky Mountains” are both composed and performed by her.
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.–Wendy Carlos, Wikipedia, Last updated: June 12, 2024
Carlos came out on the pages of Playboy in the May 1979 issue of Playboy.
PLAYBOY: Let’s set the scene for our read-ers. As Walter Carlos, you were a well-known composer and a pioneer in the field of electronic music. In 1972, after cross-dressing for a number of years, you underwent a transsexual operation and became a female-Wendy Carlos. Since that date, you’ve kept the operation a secret from all but a few close friends and, through a variety of subterfuges, have kept alive the idea that a male Walter Carlos still exists. Why have you chosen this time and place to come out?
CARLOS: Well, I’m scared, I’m very fright-ened. I don’t know what effect this is going to have. I fear for my friends; we’re going to become targets for the wrath of those who judge what I’ve done as. in moral terms, evil, in medical terms, sick-an assault on the human body. I’m also afraid from the musical standpoint. It may prevent me from being taken seriously again.
But I’ve gotten tired of lying. I think that in the past couple of years, the dangers of allowing the public to know about me have lessened. The climate has changed and the time is ripe. With the appearance of this interview, my friends won’t have to lie and dissemble for me anymore.
PLAYBOY: Why speak out in this forum?
CARLOS: I’ve been looking for the right forum and have considered all the op-tions. PLAYBOY is ideal. The magazine has always been concerned with liberation, and I’m anxious to liberate myself.
PLAYBOY: How many people know about your situation?
CARLOS: Aside from Rachel-she’s my closest friend and the woman with whom I live-there were five or six people at first. More now. When I told one of them I was doing this, he suggested I might become PLAYBOY’s first transsexual cen-terfold. [Laughs]
PLAYBOY: Do your parents know about it?
CARLOS: They know about the operation, though they haven’t accepted it.
–Playboy Interview with Wendy/Walter Carlos by Arthur Bell, May 1979, Digital Transgender Icon
After finishing work on music for The Shining, Elkind ended their long-time collaboration and Carlos began a business partnership with Annmarie Franklin. In 1980, Carlos and Franklin began work on the score for the Walt Disney Sci-Fi Film Tron
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”.[32] The score incorporated Carlos’s analog and digital synthesizers with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the UCLA Chorus, and the Royal Albert Hall Organ.[44] Tron: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was released in 1982 and reached No. 135 on the Billboard 200
In her Playboy article, Carlos explains the toll it took on her to be under “Forced secrecy” about her gender transition
Nevertheless, she revealed just how much “forced secrecy” had affected her career. Switched-On Bach’s popularity had made things hard for her, she said. She had “lost an entire decade” avoiding live performances and connections with other artists because she didn’t yet feel ready to disclose her gender transition publicly. Once, Stevie Wonder came to check out her synthesiser set-up, and Carlos hid as he knocked. Sewell writes in her book how Carlos still faces prejudice from record companies today: Warner Music has not still corrected her name on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.
Lorelei Kretsinger, of Missouri-based queer and trans music collective Un/Tuck, co-hosted a one-off Wendy Carlos tribute night before the pandemic, where artists including Octo Octa played synthesiser music inspired by her. Kretsinger holds up Carlos as a role model, but understands her discomfort with conversations about gender. “Whatever I make as a musician – say a piece of music about love – there’s the worry that someone will super-read into it as a trans piece. I can understand how Wendy feels about where the discussion is.”
‘She made music jump into 3D’: Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius by Jude Rogers, Nov. 11, 2020, The Guardian
Wendy Carlos released a collab with Weird Al Yankovich in 1986, a parody of “Peter and the Wolf”
The latest works by Wendy Carlos include Tales of Heaven & Hell, an unusual musical dramatic work which combines themes from A Clockwork Orange with a dark and forbidding gothic Mass, and the score to the British film, Woundings. Wendy then began a five-year task, remastering painstakingly optimized editions of her back catalog, many albums available on CD for the first time. The first two of these, released by East Side Digital (ESD), were Clockwork Orange, the Complete Carlos Score, and the constantly requested Sonic Seasonings. The most extensive album project is the definitive boxed set collection of her pioneering Bach & Baroque albums, including a great deal of background and historical material: test, audio, photos and graphics, available nowhere else. Other recent remasterings include Beauty in the Beast, and Digital Moonscapes.
These new editions include individual, unbundled CDs of all the Bach and Baroque albums — just as you remember them (but with greatly improved sound quality!): Switched-On Bach, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Switched-On Bach II, and the 2-CD set, Switched-On Brandenburgs. A definitive edition of the score to Disney’s TRON was also released on a (now discontinued) CD by Disney (recently made available by them in online delivery formats, from vendors such as Amazon). All of these Hi-D 20-bit ESD albums featured Enhanced-CDs, containing expanded historical notes and previously unreleased bonus material. They include: By Request and Secrets of Synthesis, a new edition of Switched-On Bach 2000, and two brand new albums, Rediscovered Lost Scores, volume I and II, a collection of filmscore music “from the vaults”, never before available.Wendy Carlos Biography, Wendycarlos.com
Carlos has been out of the spotlight for a while now. There is an unauthorized biography written by Amanda Sewell in 2020. However, Carlos is known to be a recluse who doesn’t like people writing about her.
Carlos is a notoriously reclusive person. She gives few interviews — in fact, she didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed for the new biography. (Instead, I relied on previous interviews she’s given, letters and other documents from archives, and what she’s written on her website.) She’s also critical of journalists and scholars who write about her; she recently lambasted my biography of her, calling it “fiction,” “bogus” and a “personal attack.”
–Wendy Carlos: 6 things you probably didn’t know about the composer and electronic pioneer, Amanda Sewell, November 11, 2020
Historically, Carlos’s reclusivity was in direct response to her decision to “Boymode” out in public performing in 1969 with the St. Louis Orchestra.
In 1969, Carlos was invited to perform her electronic Bach pieces with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra before a live audience. But what was supposed to be an induction into the American musical firmament turned into a nightmare for Carlos. Crying in her hotel room, she told her producer, Rachel Elkind, that she was terrified of going onstage. The estrogen treatments had transformed her appearance – she now looked like a woman – and she was panicked about the audience’s reaction.
From today’s vantage point, Carlos made a sad decision. Before she took the stage, she donned a man’s wig, pasted on fake sideburns, and had a make-up artist add beard stubble to her face. The performance was a smashing success, but Carlos decided to never perform live again.
Carlos developed a phobia about being seen in public and became a recluse in her home studio. Famous musicians – Stevie Wonder, George Harrison and Keith Emerson – showed up wanting to meet her, but Carlos couldn’t face them. Her visitors were told that Carlos was away. “I would listen to them from upstairs,” Carlos told People. “I accepted the sentence, but it was bizarre to have life opening up on the one hand and to be locked away on the other.” When forced to go out in public for television appearances and interviews, she went disguised as a man.
Wendy Carlos: The brilliant but lonely life of an electronic music pioneer by Juanjo Villalba, EL PAÍS USA Edition, December 12, 2022
As a trans person who loves the music made by Synths and any electronic music, I want to personally say thank you to Miss Carlos!
The world has Wendy Carlos to thank for any electronic music! Thank you so much for you contribution to the world of entertainment Miss Carlos. You are truly an inspiration to trans artists everywhere!!! Check out the video below for a bunch of other trans people who were probably involved in your fave songs!
Finnoula’s corner 