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Published: Tuesday, 07 January 2025 at 09:30 AM
Wendy Carlos: trans pioneer and creator of Stanley Kubrick’s creepiest soundtracks
Read on to discover all about Wendy Carlos, pioneer of the moog synthesizer and the artist behind one of classical music’s biggest selling albums…
Switched-On Bach: one of the biggest selling classical albums of all time
When in 1968 Columbia Records launched Switched-On Bach, a collection of works by JS Bach reimagined on the modular Moog synthesizer, little did they know it would become one of the biggest selling classical albums of all time.
Anticipating poor sales, the studio executives offered its composer Wendy Carlos a small advance and a high royalty deal, and bundled her album up with two others: Terry Riley’s In C, which would become a landmark work in the minimalist canon, and Rock and Other Four Letter Words, a psychedelic mix of Moog synthesizer, free jazz and sound collage that Robert Moog, who attended the launch party, described as ‘abysmal’. Riley was at the launch too, dressed in white robes and improvising on a Farfisa organ. Apparently taking umbrage at being thrown into the marketing mix, Carlos left early, leaving it to Moog to demonstrate the commercial potential of his modular synthesizer on the night.
Wendy Carlos… from Bach to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange to Stephen King’s The Shining
Even before you hear her music, the story behind Carlos’s debut album speaks volumes about its composer. At the same time as bringing about a revolution in synthesizer technology, Carlos would steer clear of the limelight, working with just a clutch of close collaborators from her studio at home in New York.
With her producer and friend Rachel Elkind she created the chilling synthesizer renderings of Purcell and Beethoven for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and revamped the Dies Irae of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique for the director’s adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining. Her collaboration with Annemarie Franklin produced the soundtrack for the cult 1980s sci-fi film Tron, with its otherworldly mix of orchestra and synths. With Robert Moog supplying her with the latest updates, Carlos put his synthesiser at the forefront of developments in new music – she released her ambient double album Sonic Seasonings long before Brian Eno came on the scene with 1978’s Music for Airports.
Wendy Carlos at 85… elusive and anti-streaming
But as she turns 85 this month, the composer, who has lived much of her life in New York, remains as elusive as ever; she hasn’t released any new work or given any interviews since the late ’90s. In 2009, she took her music off the market; a firm advocate of analogue over digital, and the owner of her entire music catalogue, she has not made any of her works available on downloading or streaming platforms.
None of this comes as a surprise when you consider the single-mindedness with which Carlos has developed her musical talent over the years, and the control she exerts not just over, but within each of her works.
Wendy Carlos the early years… a self-taught composer and scientifically brilliant
Originally from Rhode Island, she grew up in a musical family that was as cash-strapped as it was resourceful. At six, she began learning the piano, practising between lessons on the keyboard her father had drawn her on a piece of paper. She taught herself music theory from library books, learning about harmony, counterpoint and temperament.
Not just musically gifted, she was also scientifically brilliant – when she was 14, she won a prize for inventing a computer; she also built the home hi-fi system from scratch, using bits of wood and a soldering iron. Inquisitive and precocious, she was soon exploring the same avant-garde ideas that were occupying the great minds in the musical capitals of Darmstadt, Paris and New York. She loved the music of Pierre Henry – and after hearing his 1958 Orphée Ballet, an early experiment in musique concrète, she set about manipulating everyday sounds on the tape machine she’d built for her home studio.
Who were the early mentors of Wendy Carlos?
For Carlos, technical discoveries and musical invention went hand in hand. At Brown University, in Providence, she combined her studies of physics with music before heading to New York to study for a master’s in musical composition at Columbia University, where Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening had co-founded the Computer Music Center, the first research centre of its kind in America.
Here she had access to brilliant minds and to the latest electronic equipment, working on its flagship RCA Mark II synthesiser with composer Milton Babbitt. Carlos could have easily embraced the ivory towerism that Babbitt became known for with his 1958 article entitled, ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’ But a chance encounter with Robert Moog at an engineering conference in New York in 1964 set her career on a different path. ‘I accidentally woke him up,’ she later recalled. ‘He was taking a much needed nap on a banquette.’
Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog… and important partnership
Looking back, you can almost feel the intensity with which these two inquisitive minds clicked: Carlos, the music graduate who could talk science, just starting out in Manhattan; Moog, the creative engineer, able to develop the tools with which she could pursue her music career. After working as a sound engineer at Gotham Recording Studios and creating sound effects and jingles for television advertisements, Carlos had saved up enough money to buy one of Moog’s first 900-series modules. Moog delivered it to her apartment by hand.
Over the months and years that followed, he would tailor the modules to Carlos’s specification, meeting her need for greater nuance and expressivity. As one of his most demanding and discerning customers, she made a number of improvements, including a slide that controlled portamento and a polyphonic generator bank that could create chords and arpeggios – Moog also built her a touch-sensitive keyboard, long before weighted keys were commercially available.
Switched-On Bach… a work of determined genius and ‘the record of the decade’
When the technical limitations of Moog’s early synthesizer are taken into account, you begin to see why Switched-On Bach is a work of vision and graft. To showcase the capabilities of the modular synthesiser, she chose repertoire that varied in size and complexity but whose form was crystal clear, from the simple two-part inventions in F, B-flat and D minor, to the much larger Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G. To hear the surprising array of sounds on this album, you wouldn’t think that the synthesiser could only produce one note at a time.
Assisted by friend and musicologist Benjamin Folkman, Carlos built each note from scratch: first she determined its parameters – its pitch, colour, duration and attack – before placing it in a sequence to form a melody. This was then layered and synchronised to create the counterpoint and harmony in Bach’s work. The result – futuristic yet neoclassical, human yet weirdly mechanical, at times jaunty yet eerily sinister – was not to everybody’s taste. But while traditionalists shunned its kitschiness, there were classical purists who welcomed Switched-On Bach, too. At a time when he was embracing studio performance, the reclusive pianist Glenn Gould called it ‘the record of the decade’ and ‘one of the greatest feats ever achieved in a keyboard performance’.
Wendy Carlos and gender identity… transitioning as a woman and retreat from the spotlight
Carlos has said that she considered herself to be the arranger, as opposed to the composer, of these works. But there are more personal reasons for her decision not to steal the limelight. In her 2020 biography of Wendy Carlos, Amanda Sewell explores the relationship between the composer’s gender identity and her music, arguing that ‘Carlos’s gender identity has shaped many aspects of her life, her career, how she relates to the public, and how the public has received her music.’
At the time of Switched-On Bach’s release, Carlos had yet to speak openly about her transitioning as a woman. The name on the album’s cover was Walter Carlos, the one she went by at the time, but it was released on her Trans-Electronic Music Productions label. Unprepared for its commercial success – and perhaps wanting her work to be the focus of attention, rather than her gender identity – the composer opted for solitude.
Wendy Carlos and Stanley Kubrick
Has Carlos’s retreat to the studio in any way held her back as a composer? She once said she had ‘lost an entire decade’ by avoiding live appearances and public interactions with other musicians. And yet, in those early years of her career she seemed to align herself with similarly brilliant and reclusive thinkers. Having expanded the Moog’s range of repertoire to include Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Handel on her follow-up album, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, she was ideally placed to capture the pitch-black humour at the heart of A Clockwork Orange.
Carlos and Elkind had already been developing a synthesizer rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Carlos was exploring parallels between her work Timesteps and the dystopian atmosphere of Anthony Burgess’s novel, when she heard that Kubrick was adapting it for the screen. Her music – in particular her take on Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, first heard during the opening credits – offered the perfect analogy for Burgess’s brutal world in which technology could transform humanity.
In true Kubrick style, the director, who had unceremoniously deleted Alex North’s score from 2001: A Space Odyssey, cut much of Carlos’s score from his final edit. Her score for The Shining was even more savagely axed. But in her subsequent release of the complete soundtracks, they speak for themselves. Heard in its entirety, Timesteps is a work of sheer brilliance: a vast ambient landscape that moves seamlessly between episodes of movement and repose, with primitive rhythms, snippets of Beethovenian counterpoint and Ligeti-like atmospheres. Like the nature-inspired soundscape of Sonic Seasonings, it offers a sense of total escape.
Wendy Carlos… an important continuing influence
Whether in these early original works, or in the many reimaginings of classical repertoire that she would return to over the years – from 1973’s Switched-On Bach II to 1992’s Switched-on Bach 2000 – Carlos revels in the beauty of sound itself. It’s one reason her music continues to influence what we hear today, from Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon’s soundtrack for the hit Netflix TV series Stranger Things to the self-built sounds of producer and DJ Aphex Twin. While Carlos might choose to say nothing, then, her music continues to speak to us all.