51 Facts About Wendy Carlos

1.

Wendy Carlos was born on Walter Carlos, November 14,1939 and is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores.

2.

Wendy Carlos came to prominence with Switched-On Bach, 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.

3.

Wendy Carlos composed the score to two Stanley Kubrick films, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and for Tron for Walt Disney Productions.

4.

Wendy Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the first of two children born to working-class parents.

5.

Wendy Carlos's mother played the piano and sang; one uncle played the trombone and another played the trumpet and drums.

6.

Wendy Carlos began piano lessons at six years of age, and wrote her first composition, "A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano," at 10.

7.

Wendy Carlos attended St Raphael Academy, a Catholic high school in Pawtucket.

8.

In 1953, at fourteen, Wendy 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, Wendy 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.

In 1965, Wendy 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.

11.

Wendy Carlos called it "a really lovely occupation" and found it a useful learning experience.

12.

Wendy 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.

Wendy Carlos convinced Moog to add a touch-sensitive keyboard for greater musical dynamics, among other improvements.

14.

Moog credited Wendy 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.

15.

Wendy Carlos recorded several compositions in the 1960s as a student at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

16.

Wendy Carlos was one of the earliest adopters of the Dolby noise reduction system, which she used for her final two-track masters.

17.

In 1968, Wendy Carlos released Switched-On Bach, an album formed of several pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach performed on a Moog modular synthesizer.

18.

Wendy Carlos had originally wanted to record an album of her own music, but Elkind suggested that they use music that was more familiar to the general listener in order to introduce the synthesizer as a credible new instrument.

19.

The idea for an album of Bach's music performed on the Moog began to crystallize during 1967, after Wendy Carlos asked Elkind to listen to some recordings by Wendy Carlos and musicologist Benjamin Folkman made up to ten years prior at the Electronic Music Center, one of them being Bach's Two-Part Invention in F major, which Elkind took a liking to.

20.

Wendy Carlos later recalled that she worked on the recording of the album for eight hours a day, five days a week, for five months, on top of her regular 40-hour-per-week day job at Gotham Studios.

21.

Wendy Carlos performed selections from the album on stage with a synthesizer with the St Louis Symphony Orchestra.

22.

Wendy Carlos was by this time well into her gender confirmation process, and she was understandably fearful of both personal ridicule and physical attack, and of the negative impact that her status as a transitioning person could have on her music career.

23.

Wendy Carlos released a follow-up, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, with synthesized pieces from multiple composers.

24.

The success of both albums allowed Wendy Carlos to move into Elkind's more spacious New York City home in 1971.

25.

Wendy Carlos considers Elkind's contribution to her work, and specifically Switched-On Bach, to be underappreciated, calling her "a 'silent' partner" and her work "critical to my success".

26.

Later that year, Wendy Carlos released an album of music not included in the final score titled Walter Wendy Carlos' Clockwork Orange.

27.

Wendy Carlos experimented with ambient music on her third studio album Sonic Seasonings, released as a double album in 1972, with one side-long track dedicated to each of the four seasons.

28.

Wendy Carlos agreed to the request, opting to produce a sequel to Switched-On Bach, which began with her and Elkind seeking compositions that were most suitable for the synthesizer; the two picked selections from Suite No 2 in B minor, Two-Part Inventions in A minor and major, Suite from Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, and Brandenburg Concerto No 5 in D major.

29.

Wendy Carlos decided, "If I was going to spend months for mere minutes of music, I certainly wasn't going to be pigeonholed into only retreading existing music", and so began a process of "re-directing new ideas, reworking old ones".

30.

Wendy Carlos reunited with Kubrick to compose the score for his psychological horror film The Shining.

31.

Wendy Carlos recorded a complete electronic score for the film, but Kubrick ended up using mostly existing recordings by several avant-garde composers, tracks that he had used as guide tracks during editing.

32.

Some of Wendy Carlos's music had some legal issues regarding its release, but much of it was made available in 2005 as part of her two-volume compilation album Rediscovering Lost Scores.

33.

Wendy Carlos remained in New York City, sharing a converted loft in Greenwich Village with her new business partner Annemarie Franklin.

34.

Wendy Carlos agreed, but was not interested in composing solely with electronic music, as she wished to incorporate an orchestra with her musical ideas.

35.

Three studio albums from Wendy Carlos were released in the 1980s.

36.

Wendy Carlos wrote the album's tracks for orchestra "or orchestra replica", inspired by various astronomical subjects, which used some leftover material from her score to Tron.

37.

Wendy Carlos considers the album as the most important of her career.

38.

In 1988, CBS Records asked Wendy Carlos to collaborate with comical musician "Weird Al" Yankovic to release a parody of Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev.

39.

Wendy Carlos agreed to the project, as she felt it presented a chance "to let your sense of humor out of the cage".

40.

Yankovic adapted and narrated its story, while Wendy Carlos rearranged the music with a "MIDI orchestra", her first venture using the digital interface.

41.

Wendy Carlos wrote the soundtrack to the British film Brand New World, known as Woundings, directed by Roberta Hanley and based on a play by Jeff Noon.

42.

Wendy Carlos explained the style of her music: "I was given fairly large carte blanche to do some horrific things and some inside-psyche mood paintings, and that's what the film became".

43.

In 1998, Wendy Carlos released her most recent studio album, Tales from Heaven and Hell, for the East Side Digital label.

44.

Wendy Carlos cried in her hotel room and left wearing fake sideburns and a man's wig, and drew facial hair on her face with an eyebrow pencil to appear more like a man.

45.

Wendy Carlos disclosed her transgender status in a series of interviews with Arthur Bell held between December 1978 and January 1979 and published in the May 1979 issue of Playboy magazine.

46.

Wendy Carlos explained in Playboy that she had "always been concerned with liberation, and [I was] anxious to liberate myself".

47.

On her personal website, Wendy Carlos describes the work as "fiction" that mischaracterizes her life and deceased parents.

48.

In 2005, Wendy 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.

49.

Wendy 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 systems.

50.

Wendy Carlos was dismissive of smaller systems like the EMS Putney and the Minimoog as "toys" and "cash-ins".

51.

Wendy Carlos has developed various techniques for the extension of dynamic range in eclipse photography by the use of darkroom techniques and digital composites.