Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos, November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores.
Wendy Carlos
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.[1] 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 sex reassignment surgery.[2][3][4]
As of 2020, much of Carlos's discography is out of print, and has not been licensed for digital distribution to streaming or download platforms.[5]
Early life[edit]
Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the first of two children born to working-class parents.[6] Her mother played the piano and sang; one uncle played the trombone and another played the trumpet and drums.[6] She began piano lessons at age six,[7] and wrote her first composition, "A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano", at age ten.[8]
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.[9] From 1958 to 1962, Carlos studied at Brown University and graduated with a degree in music and physics, during which she taught lessons in electronic music at informal sessions.[10]
Career[edit]
1960s[edit]
In 1965, Carlos graduated from Columbia University with a master's degree in music composition, and assisted Leonard Bernstein in presenting an evening of electronic music at the Philharmonic Hall.[10] Carlos studied with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, two pioneers of electronic music in the 1960s. They were based in the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, the first of its kind in the United States. After Ussachevsky suggested to Carlos that she work in a recording studio to support herself, Carlos began working as a recording and mastering engineer at Gotham Recording Studios in New York City; she worked in this position until 1968.[6][10][11] She called it "a really lovely occupation" and found it a useful learning experience.[11]
During her time at Columbia, Carlos met Robert Moog at the 1964 Audio Engineering Society show,[12] which began a partnership. Carlos ordered custom-designed synthesizer modules from Moog, and gave him extensive advice and technical assistance in the development of what became the Moog synthesizer, Moog's new electronic instrument.[13] She convinced Moog to add a touch-sensitive keyboard for greater musical dynamics, among other improvements.[14] Moog recounted that Carlos fed back extensive and very detailed—but always 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.[13]
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".[6] In 1967, Carlos met and befriended fellow Gotham Recorders employee Rachel Elkind, a former singer[6] who had a jazz and musical theatre background and had worked as a secretary for Goddard Lieberson, then-president of Columbia Records. Although their initial meetings were somewhat confrontational (Elkind initially found Carlos "arrogant"), they eventually became friends and began sharing a home, studio, and business premises in a brownstone building in the West Side of Manhattan in New York City.[15]
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.[16]
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 his 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.[12] By the time Carlos began recording Switched On Bach she had built a home studio valued at around US$12,000 (approx. $100,000 in 2023)[17] (although, given the unique nature of most of the modules, and their provenance, the 2023 value of her studio equipment would likely be far higher).
Her home studio, crucially, included an eight-track recorder that Carlos had built herself (because she was unable to afford a factory-made machine), using parts from Ampex and EMI recorders, with the addition of Ampex's patented "Sel-Sync" system, which enabled recorded signals to be monitored via the record head, rather than the playback head, thus permitting multiple tracks to be kept in perfect synchronisation. Carlos was also one of the earliest adopters of the Dolby noise reduction system, which she used for her final two-track masters.[18]
Personal life[edit]
Gender transition[edit]
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".[6] While at Brown, she went on a date with a girl and felt "so jealous of her I was beside myself".[30]
Sometime after entering graduate school at Columbia University in the fall of 1962, she encountered studies of transgender issues for the first time, which explained to her what she was feeling. In the summer of 1966, New York sexologist and pioneering transgender advocate Harry Benjamin published his landmark book The Transsexual Phenomenon, and, in the fall of 1967, Carlos began counseling with him (well before Switched-On Bach).[30]
By early 1968, Carlos had begun hormone replacement treatment under Benjamin's care, which began altering her appearance.[6][52][53] 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 felt terrified about appearing in public. She cried in her hotel room, before putting on fake sideburns and a man's wig, and drawing 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.[30]
Finally, the commercial success of Switched-On Bach allowed Carlos the funds to undergo sex reassignment surgery in May 1972,[3] although for marketing reasons she released two more albums as Walter Carlos (1973's Switched-On Bach II and 1975's By Request).[30]
Carlos disclosed her transgender status in a series of interviews with Arthur Bell held between December 1978 and January 1979, published in the May 1979 issue of Playboy magazine. She explained in Playboy that she had "always been concerned with liberation, and [I was] anxious to liberate myself".[6] In 1985, Carlos spoke about the reaction to her transition: "The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent ... There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life."[30]
The first album released after the Playboy interview, Switched-On Brandenburgs (1980), and all subsequent releases and re-releases, have been issued under the name Wendy Carlos.
Lawsuit[edit]
In 1998, Carlos sued the songwriter/artist Momus for $22 million regarding the song "Walter Carlos" (from the album The Little Red Songbook, released that year), which postulated that after the sex reassignment surgery Wendy could travel back in time to marry her pre-transition self, Walter.[54] 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.[55]
Published biography[edit]
A biography by musicologist Amanda Sewell, Wendy Carlos: A Biography, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Although the author was unable to secure on-the-record interviews with the artist or anyone close to her,[56] it was positively received by critics.[57][58][59] On her personal website, Carlos describes the work as "fiction" that mischaracterizes her life and deceased parents.[60]
Switched-On Bach was the winner of three Grammy Awards at the 1970 ceremony:[61][62]
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).[61]
In 2005, Carlos was the recipient of the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award "in recognition of lifetime achievement and contribution to the art and craft of electro-acoustic music" by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States.[63]
Carlos is the first transgender recipient of a Grammy Award.[64]
Other activities[edit]
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 (aka ARP) systems. She was dismissive of smaller systems like the EMS Putney and the Minimoog as "toys" and "cash-ins".[12]
Carlos is also an accomplished solar eclipse photographer. Her work has been published online by NASA[65][66][67][68][69] 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.[66][70]
