| M10 March from A Clockwork Orange/Ninth Symphony, 4th Movement, (L v Beethoven 1824, W Carlos, R Elkind 1970) Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Warner Bros Records, 1972 (7:00)
· Wendy Carlos – Moog Synthesizer
· Rachel Elkind Producer and Articulations
Today’s Vinyl Vibrations podcast features the artistry of Wendy Carlos, an American composer, arranger, and electronic musician. Wendy Carlos was born Walter Carlos in Rhode Island in November 1939. She is the first transgender recipient of a Grammy Award, her album SWITCHED-ON BACH won three Grammys in 1970. Later, in 2005 she was the recipient of the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to the art and craft of electro-acoustic music.
Wendy Carlos is best known for her electronic music such as SWITCHED-ON BACH…and film scores such as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, THE SHINING and TRON.
Her studies of music composition at Columbia University in New York City in the 1960s led to her working with electronic musicians and technicians where she helped in the development of the MOOG SYNTHESIZER. This was the first commercially available keyboard instrument from Robert Moog. During her time at Columbia, Carlos ordered components of a custom designed synthesizer from Robert Moog, and she collaborated with Moog on the design of that early instrument, which became known as the MOOG SYNTHESIZER. Some of the modules included a touch-sensitive keyboard, a portamento control, which slides notes in the scale between one note and the next, a filter bank, and a 49-oscillator polyphonic generator bank that could create chords and arpeggios, arpeggios are the individual notes of those chords played in cycles.
Today, we take the synthesizer for granted. The keyboard synthesizer has become widely-available, and most keyboard musicians today, including me, use a synth keyboard such as BEHRINGER, KORG, NORD, ROLAND, YAMAHA, and yes… even the brand Carlos herself helped design with Robert Moog, the MOOG synthesizer.
After getting her Masters in Music Composition from Columbia University in 1965, Carlos worked for three years at Gotham Recording Studios in New York City, to support herself. She also used her Moog Synthesizer to record jingles for TV commercials. The recording engineering job would prove to be extremely valuable just three years later as she self-recorded the entire SWITCHED-ON BACH album, which is featured in today’s podcast.
In 1968, Carlos, then Walter Carlos, released her first LP, SWITCHED-ON BACH, containing several pieces written by Johann Sebastian Bach, which she arranged and recorded from her Moog Synthesizer. SWITCHED-ON BACH was released on Columbia Masterworks as part of a two-record recording contract. Carlos negotiated a good royalty arrangement, because the label really didn’t expect the album would sell many copies. Classical music rarely, if ever, achieves Gold let alone Platinum unit sales.
What makes this first album fascinating is knowing that the MOOG Synthesizer was in a very early state – – – barely a usable product. …You could not sit down and bang out a song like you could on a piano or organ. The first Moog Synthesizer could play only one note at a time. No chords! No two-handed playing ! No buttons with presets for sounds and effects! Instead, a lot of patch cables and knobs to adjust.
Every individual part had to be recorded, note for note, and then layered over the previously recorded parts. This was all done on an eight-track recorder. State of the Art at that time. Recorded parts were time-aligned with use of a click track. Carlos did not document her settings for knobs and patch cable connections – – These were complex, but she was able to recall each part’s sound from her own memory, a living library of hundreds of settings for all the knobs and cables. To add to the laborious nature of early electronic music, the Moog, being an analog device, would frequently drift out of tune. This made the recording and layering process very repetitive, tedious and laborious. The story goes that Carlos would use a hammer to bang on the Moog casing to get it back in-tune, and then re-record the part.
According to Wendy Carlos, the Switched-On Bach song recordings required 8-hour days, 5 days a week for 5 months to complete. In other words, Carlos invested some 900 to 1,000 man-hours of her own recording time to lay down what was published That is one-half man-year resulting in 12 songs for a total play time of 40 minutes on the Switched-On Bach LP.
And this was moonlighting for Wendy Carlos, she was also working full-time job at the Gotham Recording Studios! That is extreme PASSION for arranging and creating electronic music!
Today we will hear selections from three early LP productions of Wendy Carlos.
These three albums are:
- SWITCHED-ON BACH
- WALTER CARLOS’ CLOCKWORK ORANGE
- And STANLEY KUBRICK’S CLOCWORK ORANGE
Each of these albums are in my collection, and each album refers to and gives credit to WALTER CARLOS, her name at that time.
There is also a Corporate ID and a self-credit to Walter Carlos stating on the album liner notes: THIS ALBUM WAS DEVISED AND PRODUCED BY TRANS ELECTRONIC MUSIC PRODUCTIONS INC. We can see that Wendy Carlos has been very protective of her copyrights and ownership of this music.
Wendy Carlos has released some 13 studio albums, created 5 film soundtracks, including A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Tron, and Rediscovering Lost Scores, in two volumes.
Sadly, as of 2020, much of Carlos’s discography is out of print and has not been released for digital streaming or other platforms. BUT WE HAVE THE VINYL LPs, WHICH HAVE STOOD THE TEST OF TIME.
Fortunately, there is a treasure trove of information on Wendy’s personal website, www.wendycarlos.com
There are many many pages painstakenly updated through about 2009, this is Wendy Carlos’ personal database of information.
Carlos is also an accomplished solar eclipse photographer, and her work has been published by NASA. She has developed techniques for extending the dynamic range in eclipse photography.
Carlos remains very private, but I believe she continues to live at her music studio in New York City. At the time of this podcast recording she is 83-1/2 years old.
Perhaps we can visit two other soundtracks THE SHINING and TRON in a part 2 podcast of Wendy Carlos soundtrack skills.
That’s it for today’s show “WENDY CARLOS, ELECTRONIC COMPOSER and ARRANGER “, on VINYL VIBRATIONS.
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