Biography
Wendy Carlos elevated the commercial profile of electronic music in the closing years of the 1960s by bringing the synthesizer into mainstream awareness through the blockbuster success of Switched-On Bach. She entered the world in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on November 14, 1939, and later completed an M.A. in composition at Columbia University’s Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, studying with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening. Upon finishing her degree she relocated to Manhattan and took a position as a recording engineer. There she encountered Dr. Robert Moog and soon began performing on the Moog synthesizer. Her debut release, Switched-On Bach, appeared in 1968. The album demonstrated the Moog’s capabilities by rendering Bach’s celebrated fugues and movements through cutting-edge synthesizer techniques; although traditionalists reacted with dismay, the recording seized the public’s attention and eventually became the first classical album to receive platinum certification from the RIAA while also securing three Grammy Awards. She followed with a comparable project, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, in 1969. For Stanley Kubrick’s provocative 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, Carlos composed the score and introduced the vocoder—an electronic instrument created to generate synthesized human speech—into the soundtrack. After issuing Brandenburg Concertos 3-5 in 1976, she collaborated once more with Kubrick on the 1980 screen version of Stephen King’s The Shining. Two years afterward she supplied music for the Disney feature Tron. Later projects encompassed a humorous reworking of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” recorded with Weird Al Yankovic and the album Switched-On Bach 2000.
Albums
