Wendy Carlos

Walter Carlos was born in 1939 in Rhode Island. Carlos was a musical prodigy and also a technical genius. Before the age of fifteen, Carlos had composed “A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano” and had built a computer (even though this was before the word computer was a household term) From an early age however, Walter Carlos was aware of her gender dysphoria. In 1962, during her time at Columbia University, Carlos learned about transgenderism and in the fall of 1967 began hormone treatments. At this time she changed her name to Wendy and began living life as a full-time woman. In 1972, Carlos underwent a sexual reassignment surgery.

Wendy Carlos is known for electronic music and being the first to draw attention to synthesizers as musical instruments. Switched-On-Bach was Carlos’ break-through album that was created using multi-track recording and performing pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach on the Moog synthesizer. It was the first classical album to sell over 500,000 copies and even entered Billboard’s pop Top 40. The creation of this album was tedious and required numerous takes and overdubs to create. The two sequels to this album are The Well-Tempered Synthesizer and Switched on Bach II.

In 1971, Wendy Carlos worked with Stanley Kubrick to create the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange. Not all of the music she created was used in the movie, so Carlos released Wendy Carlos’ Clockwork Orange with all of the additional music. Carlos continued scoring soundtracks for movies through her work in The Shining and Tron.

Wendy Carlos is a pioneer in electronic music, but also had many personal problems due to her sex change. In 1979, she decided to announce her change in Playboy because this magazine was so concerned with liberation. She later regretted this decision calling the editors “arrogant selfish prig[s].”

Here are some examples to the contributions Wendy made to the electronic world.

To find out more about the life and music of Wendy Carlos, here is a link to her webpage.