Wendy Carlos Revisited

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Please enjoy this expanded update on Grammy award-winning transsexual composer Wendy Carlos. An article on Wendy (previously Walter of Switched on Bach fame) was featured in an edition of Polare last year.

Carlos has written conventional works for ensembles as diverse as the Kronos Quartet, the London Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony, and film scores for short subjects and full length features. However, during her long recording career, she has hardly followed a conventional music course.

The hit recording, Switched-On Bach, the first classical album to go Platinum, propelled the Moog synthesizer into the public consciousness. After refining her techniques in The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Carlos introduced the use of vocoders for synthesized singing in her score for Kubrick's film, A Clockwork Orange, long before space war movies made synthetic voices common. Her haunting Sonic Seasonings predated the now popular environmental-ambience forms of New Age music by over a decade.

Shortly after writing horror music for Kubrick's The Shining, Wendy Carlos composed the score for Disney's Tron, which established a continuous blend between symphonic orchestra and digital and analog synthesizers, an often imitated combination. The Digital Moonscapes followed in 1984, introducing the "LSI Philharmonic Orchestra", a digital replica of orchestral timbres virtually indistinguishable from their acoustic instrumental counterparts. In 1986 Wendy Carlos returned to a life-long interest in music using alternate scales and musical tunings as she composed a departure from conventional music, combining ideas from the cultures of Bali, India, Bulgaria, Africa, and Tibet, with new ideas in similar spirit. The result, Beauty in the Beast, was a trip to a world of stimulating sounds and scales. Out of this project, she came in contact with several microtonal pioneers, like legendary Ivor Darreg, & also American Microtonal Festival's Johnny Reinhard, now a close friend.

Carlos collaborated with (Weird) Al Yankovic on a humorous musical album, including a parody of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf with a whimsical extension of a Saint-Saens classic, called Carnival of the Animals - Part Two. This tongue-in-cheek blend of verbal and musical parody continued her LSI Philharmonic timbres and orchestral recreation. This time it was performed directly into a Macintosh computer, using all the latest M.I.D.I. and S.M.P.T.E. technology, allowing both precision and human feel to the instrumental accompaniment.

With Switched on Bach 2000, Wendy Carlos came full circle by applying modern techniques and equipment to create a look back at the early classic, this time using the non-equal temperaments Bach' himself preferred. It provides listeners with an opportunity to experience how far the new medium has progressed in 25 years, and contains a performance of the much-requested Toccata & Fugue in d.

Over the last three years, in collaboration with synthesist and friend Larry Fast, Carlos has developed a state-of-the-art digital process of soundtrack restoration and surround steteoization conversion called: Digi-Surround Stereo Sound. She is a continuing consultant and developer of new voice libraries and tuning tables for Kurzweil/Young Chang. Wendy Carlos has delivered keynote papers at New York University, the Audio Engineering Society's Digital Audio Conference and other music/audio conventions, and is a member of the A.E.S., N.A.R.A.S. and S.M.P.T.E.. She consults for several Macintosh developers including Coda, Mark of the Unicorn, Opcode and Altsys, and has designed and implemented two new PostScript music fonts for Casady & Greene. Currently she is working on an unusual musical dramatic work which combines themes from "A Clockwork Orange" with a dark, forbidding, gothic Black Mass, due to be released this year. Wendy Carlos lives in Greenwich Village in New York. Hobbies include: eclipse chasing, photography, drawing, astronomy, reading, gourmet food, film, and a love of animals.

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.