Ah, Fall. Around this time of year, many of us like to ring in the change of season by getting cozy, putting our feet up, and diving into timeless films, like the cult classic "A Clockwork Orange" and horror staple "The Shining." These two films share more than just a director (and one of the greatest of all time at that): their scores were also written by composer Wendy Carlos, an early innovator of electronic music with deep ties to classical music. But her influence doesn't stop there. She's also a pioneering transgender artist, whose transition in the 1970s helped open doors for generations of musicians in the decades after.
Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1939, Carlos demonstrated an early aptitude and affinity both for music and science and technology. She wrote her first composition at 10 and built her own computer at 14, which earned her a scholarship from the Westinghouse Science Fair. In 1965, she earned a degree in music and physics from Brown University, then earned a master’s in music from Columbia University, in no less than the very first electronic music program of its kind in the United States. Carlos dove into work as a recording and mastering engineer for Gotham Records shortly thereafter, on recommendation from her professors, though not before assisting legendary conductor, composer, and pianist Leonard Bernstein in presenting a concert of electronic music with the New York Philharmonic. This directly led to a now-iconic “Young People’s Concert” in 1969 that featured music by Bach transcribed for synthesizer, which you can listen to below:
So how exactly did Carlos go from studying electronic music in school to working with one of the most famous classical artists in the world? Well, during her time at Columbia, Carlos made one of her most significant contributions to the world of electronic music: her efforts in developing the Moog (pronounced “mohg,” with a hard G as in “goat”) synthesizer, one of the first widely known electronic instruments. After meeting the synthesizer’s maker and namesake Robert Moog at an annual Audio Engineering Society conference, she requested custom synthesizer modules from Moog to accommodate her own musical and practical purposes on the instrument. Many of these custom modules would be directly incorporated into the final production model of the synthesizer. Moog credits Carlos with making the Moog what it is, both then and today.
Much like a pianist for theater productions or silent films, Carlos found work using the dynamic expressivity of the Moog to record jingles and sound effects for commercials. This led to her first commercial recording, "Moog 900 Series – Electronic Music Systems (1967)," which was moreso a technical demonstration of the Moog’s capabilities than it was a musical offering. Nevertheless, her efforts on the album (a mere 9 minute long EP!) netted Carlos some further equipment for the Moog as part of her compensation agreement.
By the time of her break-out album "Switched-On Bach" in 1968, Carlos had built an electronic music studio valued at nearly $100,000 in today’s dollars, which she used in that recording (itself a grueling 1100 hour long endeavor). If "Moog 900 Series – Electronic Music Systems (1967)" was a technical demonstration of the capabilities of the Moog, "Switched-On Bach" was a musical demonstration. Carlos initially wanted to record an album of her own compositions for the album, but the producer argued that, if the instrument was experimental, the music should be familiar, so listeners would be more likely to give it a shot.
This proved to be an astute calculation, as the album was an immediate yet unexpected breakout hit, with Glenn Gould hailing "Switched-On Bach" as the “album of the decade.” The recording won three Grammy Awards (for Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance, and Best Engineered Classical Recording), spent three consecutive years at number one on the classical music charts, acquired certified Gold status in 1969, certified Platinum status in 1986, and led Newsweek to call the Moog the “Steinway of the Future.” Listeners praised the album for Carlos’s juxtaposition of radically alien sounds with the album’s timeless source material as well as a distinct contrapuntal clarity, which the Moog complemented well as a single-voiced instrument.
That being said, it was exactly this feature which caused the album to take so long to make, as each layer needed to be re-recorded and synced manually with the previously recorded material to make a cohesive whole. You can listen to the entirety of "Switched-On Bach" via the Internet Archive here.
While Carlos suddenly found herself in unexpected commercial success with "Switched-On Bach," she was simultaneously experiencing one of the most significant struggles of her life: her gender transition. Carlos did not live publicly as a woman at this point, and it was due to her growing celebrity at the end of the ‘60s and into the early ‘70s that Carlos was forced to reconcile with her inner identity conflicting with her outer reality. By 1968, Carlos was undergoing hormone replacement therapy, and in 1972 she underwent gender affirming surgery, allowing her to identify as a woman in her private life. She was still going by her previous name professionally, though, and disguised herself as a man using makeup and fake facial hair for public appearances, an experience that was deeply traumatic for her.
And these public appearances were growing more frequent. Success with "Switched-On Bach" led to a number of other successful albums, including but not limited to: "The Well-Tempered Synthesizer," "Switched-On Bach-II," and "Switched-On Brandenburgs," as well as "By Request," an album comprised both of original compositions and electronic arrangements of pop and classical music that were requested by fans, including arrangements of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Tom Jones, and The Beatles, among others.
Her success in the commercial music industry quickly dripped into the film industry, too. "Switched-On Bach" led to film scores for Stanley Kubrick’s "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Shining" in 1971 and 1980 respectively, Disney’s "Tron" in 1982, and another album collaboration with none other than Weird Al Yankovic in 1989 by request from CBS Records. This collaboration yielded "Peter and the Wolf/Carnival of the Animals—Part II," an album featuring a parody of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf as well as Camille Saint-Saëns’s alleged “sequel” to his jovial and widely-beloved posthumous masterpiece Carnival of the Animals.
In 1979, buoyed by her flourishing career, Carlos came out publicly via an interview with author and journalist Arthur Bell in "Playboy" magazine. Carlos said that she had "always been concerned with liberation, and [I was] anxious to liberate myself,” and later remarked how surprised she was with the public’s 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.”
Today, Carlos is remembered most fondly for her radical integration of electronic instruments into contemporary classical music, her contributions in perfecting the Moog synthesizer and popularization of electronic music, and her musical contributions to iconic films including "The Shining," "Tron," and "A Clockwork Orange," which set a new standard for electronic music in film scores. In honor of this body of work, in 2005 she received the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, and has since released remasters of some of her older recordings and previously-unheard original compositions.
Her legacy continues via the titans of the musical world who followed in her footsteps, such as Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Brian Eno, Stevie Wonder, and The Beatles, to name a few, as well as her many musical and technological contributions.
But most significantly of all, Carlos transitioned publicly at a time when legal protections for trans individuals were just barely beginning to sprout in the United States. Though she experienced little backlash and remains widely beloved by many in the electronic and contemporary classical music worlds today, it was not immediately apparent that her success under her former name would be enough to protect her after the world found out about her transition. She took an enormous risk to be publicly herself, and paved the way for a generation of musicians to tread new musical waters and be unabashedly themselves, both in their personal lives and their musical ones.
