Switched On Wendy

by Daniel Rue, Music Technology, June 1993

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Wendy Carlos

Though not exactly obscuring the achievements of a 28-year career as a pioneer of synthesized sound, the operation through which Walter Carlos changed gender and became Wendy Carlos has always carried with it that element of sensationalism which has threatened to sideline her contribution to contemporary music. And that contribution has been considerable.

Though latterly regarded as something of a novelty album, the impact of Switched On Bach on an unsuspecting world back in 1968 cannot be overstated. Simply put: for many of the millions of people that heard it, it was the first use of pure, electronic sound as a credible means of producing music.

It couldn't have happened at a more opportune moment. Electronic music was, seemingly, still held in the stranglehold of the experimentalists ­Stockhausen, Cage, Berio et al. whose apparent rejection of anything that could be considered to have "entertainment value" had effectively restricted its appreciation to a small group somewhere at the margins of the avant-garde. Unlike many of her contemporaries working with electronic sound, Carlos apparently had no desire to "re-invent" music through new forms of notation, the introduction of random elements, or the reliance on chance, and was content simply readjust our perception of what could be achieved through the processing of sound from electronic sources.

The release of Switched On Bach dovetailed perfectly with (indeed, was prompted by) the development of the music synthesizer - in this case the Moog - and in many ways acted as the catalyst for the interest which was starting to surround this new and exciting departure in instrument technology. The choice of Bach concertos as the album's musical source was equally inspired. It carried with it the respectability that could only come from music written by one of the world's greatest composers, yet didn't place undue expressive and dynamic demands on an instrument still at a relatively early stage in its development.

Classically trained in music at Brown University and physics at Columbia, Carlos went on to become the first person to use vocoders - in the film score for Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange - and predated "new age" music by more than a decade with environmental/ambient compositions like Sonic Seasonings. After writing scores for Kubrick's The Shining and Disney's Tron, Carlos successfully replicated an entire philharmonic orchestra, using additive F.M. synthesis, on 1984's Digital Moonscape. And the ground-breaking continued with the album Beauty In the Beast, an exploration into alternative scales and tunings based on the music of Bali, India, Bulgaria, Africa and Tibet.

Carlos' most recent work is Switched On Bach 2000, a reworking of the compositions included in her original 1968 recording using current techniques and computer sequencing, digital recording and editing, and digital synthesis.

As Carlos says of her work, "It's a question of personal integrity. You have to be a little obsessive, and a little bit aware of things as a left-hemisphere person. You have to know what you're doing. But after that's all done, you put the driver in charge as being your soul, your emotion, your gut, your intuition".

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