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Adult Swim's "Lords of Synth" comedy short contains a homage to Wendy Carlos in the form of a certain "Carla Wendos" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino
There's also the documentary "Sisters with transistors" about women pioneers of electronic music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-3hlzpV7M
"Sisters with Transistors" is a superb film. Before I watched it, the only one of the many extraordinary women presented therein that I knew of was Delia Derbyshire.
I had no idea that the soundtrack to The Forbidden Planet (which may very well be the greatest Science Fiction film ever made), was by Louis and Bebe Barron on equipment they pretty much entirely built themselves. Today, we plug in a laptop, back then you were a true pioneer.
Anyone knows if this is a available for streaming? BTW, the catchy synth in the trailer is here:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=52f1ElmTy4o&feature=share
Laurie Spiegel - Appalachian Grove I
I love that Adult Swim short for many reasons, but especially that blink-and-you'll-miss-it statement that trans women are, in fact, women.
+1 Sisters with Transistors. I watched this in the dark at the Metrograph, a theater in the outskirts of Manhattan, with maybe six other people, and the experience was transcendental.
I did actually come looking for a reference to Lords of Synth, and I wish I could upvote this twice.
The first link would have stood on it's own as a post.
When I was quite a bit younger I went through a Wendy Carlos obsession, and spent a lot of time with Switched On Bach, Clockwork Orange, and some of Wendy’s other synth works.
Much later on, after my interests had wandered a long way from analog synth stuff, I went through a Bossa Nova phase, and at some point discovered Joao Gilberto’s 1973 self titled album which shortly became one of my favourite albums of all time. It’s an absolutely hypnotic, beautifully stripped back yet harmonically complex distillation of the bossa sound.
Only after having listened to it surely hundreds of times I read up on the recording and discovered that Carlos was the sound engineer!
Related:
The Wendy Carlos Total Eclipse Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30096161 - Jan 2022 (1 comment)
Wendy Carlos on Bob Moog (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26553486 - March 2021 (57 comments)
Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25061260 - Nov 2020 (2 comments)
Where is Wendy Carlos? (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23394457 - June 2020 (2 comments)
Wendy Carlos – Electronic Music Pioneer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662642 - Dec 2018 (1 comment)
How Wendy Carlos Changed Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16077589 - Jan 2018 (43 comments)
Now 83, she supposedly remains active in music, but is still an elusive figure who fiercely protects her work...
Her self-imposed seclusion is a cautionary tale for us today, something that she admitted in the 1979 People interview. “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent,” she said. “There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
It's really hard to say how things might have gone had we taken some other path and she remains a reclusive figure. Some things are intractable problems, like it or not. (And I definitely don't like how hard the world makes it for trans individuals.)
I've always suspected she's very introverted, private, and a perfectionist.
We can't discuss Wendy Carlos without mentioning the still online old school "Wendy Carlos Homepage" that is straight out of 1996.
Thanks for that link, it prompted me to send her a thank you note, which was really long overdue.
Love the Tron soundtrack and am happy to learn about Wendy Carlos. Unfortunately, she has fought tirelessly to keep her music from being digitized and available online or streaming. I did however find this delightful collaboration she did with Weird Al Yankovic remaking Peter and the Wolf:
Most of her works are available on CD, so they are digitized.
There must be a balance point between greed and control vs letting people enjoy your work. I understand the need for artists to earn a living, but being to restrictive will paint you in to a corner.
In a way she is doing the same to her music as she did to her self; hiding it away from public view
I lived in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where Wendy was from in 1982 when Wendy did this and never heard of her. Pawtucket was a tough multi-ethnic working class town, so I can't imagine how difficult it was for her to be public at that time. I was really into synthesizers then too. Amazing stuff.
Tron Suite - Wendy Carlos (1982)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5RcNuQXuR4
Clockwork Orange [1971] - Theme
Poor Wendy. I was literally thinking of her yesterday when I pulled out my original Clockwork Orange record. I would love her to do a masterclass and be able to extract some of her knowledge for my own experiments in electronic music. The whole world has lost out here. It's not too late though, I hope we see something from her.
Wendy released an album where she explains her technique and gives examples. Really worth the listen: https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Synthesis-Wendy-Carlos/dp/B00...
As a trans woman; semi-professional musician, producer; audio engineer, and for whom Stanley Kubrick is my favourite artist of any medium, Wendy Carlos is one of the single greatest inspirations of my life.
I can’t personally imagine the struggle she went through all that time ago; having the courage to be herself when even today it’s been a personal struggle.
Gems like her really only come around every once in a while.
Lynn Conway is another woman I look up to. The trans women who lived between 1950 and 1980 and still managed to advance their careers impress me, and I do my best to emulate them.
One of the most frustrating things as a Carlos fan is that she is a huge fan of surround sound, records for surround sound, yet hasn't released any of her catalogue in true multichannel surround.
Owed to my father's long interest in electronic music, I'm the thankful owner of several of the 1960s/1970s original print Walter Carlos-attributed vinyl records and a few of the 1980s Wendy Carlos-attributed ones. Switched-On Bach/Brandenburgs, Sonic Seasonings, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer etc. all played a large part in my discovery of electronic music as a child.
The first Bach I heard as a kid were those vinyl records. Never thought about them as electronic music, just after getting a little bit older I realized this was connected with computers. I was always impressed by the covers [1].
The interesting thing is that these vinyl records were at home and at my grandparents home who love classical music. The impact of Wendy Carlos evidently goes beyond electronics.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=wendy+carlos+electronic+bach...
Would you be willing to work with an archivist to make these public? (I'm not one, to be clear.) Carlos recordings seem impossible to find!
I was 8 when my dad handed me a set of headphones and had me listen to the first few minutes of Switched On Bach. Still vividly remember that experience, it was like a rapture.
Wendy's works are tough to find on streaming services these days. I'd love to listen to Timesteps again, from A Clockwork Orange.
My absolute favourite is the "Beauty in the Beast" album.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_in_the_Beast
Even if you do not know anything about music theory you will still feel the power of those strange and alien alternate tunings.
Titular track: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2j1gy2
Slightly related: there's someone (Robert Bancarli, project name "Baroquenoise" https://www.baroquenoise.com/ ) putting out Moogish classical covers in the style of Carlos. He just released a Bieber (no, the other Bieber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ignaz_Franz_Biber ) album https://open.spotify.com/album/01wxyAfeU3auxstFgmL3l2?si=jX_... , and the Passacaglia is pretty good: https://open.spotify.com/track/468ncKcCdFzsVAWyqqEJLE?si=d5a... . Maybe there's a whole scene of people releasing this kind of thing? If so I'm not aware of it.
One of my faves in the genre is Marco Rosano "Analog Bach" (he released twomalnums in that series). Great use of synths!
`Wendy Carlos demonstrates her Moog Synthesizer in 1970`
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SBDH5uhs4Q
I'm going to have to dig into Wendy Carlos more and will thanks to this thread and comments. When I came across the above I must have gotten sidetracked with Laurie Spiegel.
Still love the original theme from Tron.
As much as the Tron (2010) movie's score had a "cool" factor it lacked the heart and soul of the original.
If they ever do another one I'd like to see the original Carlos' Tron's leitmotif woven back into it.
Tron 2 soundtrack was such a huge disappointment from me, and I'm a die hard Daft Punk fan. Listened to it once, never went back to it.
The original Tron soundtrack is such a joy, totally underrated... Amazing how she blended electronics with orchestration... in my memory it feels like a purely electronic soundtrack but it's not at all. The artistic impulse would be to go full electronic with something like this, she went in the opposite direction, and gave the score a sense of humanity (humans in the computer world).
Carlos kept pushing the envelope on everything she did. Up there with Delia Derbyshire to me... total pioneer.
Didn’t realize she did the soundtrack to Tron. Amazing music in that film.
I visited the Moog museum this summer with a friend while visiting Asheville, NC. I asked if they had any Wendy Carlos related memorabilia and they didn't seem to. I think may be there was a Switched on Bach vinyl up on a wall in the back.... It made me feel a little sad. I think living with gender dysphoria hurts people's self-esteem tremendously. She also lived in a time when April Ashley, who was the image of feminine beauty and grace, was accosted by old ladies in parks to shame her for "pretending" to be a woman once she was outed by UK tabloids just as her career began to take off. It's understandable why she'd want to avoid embracing fame. Even today trans people, and especially women, are an acceptable punching bag for both the public at large and public figures to take out their frustrations on....
She didn't become world famous like she may have if she'd been lucky enough to be born cisgender, but the thing that matters most is whether she found happiness in her private life. I hope she did.
The final paragraph of the article is interesting though:
> Her self-imposed seclusion is a cautionary tale for us today, something that she admitted in the 1979 People interview. “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent,” she said. “There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
While that kind of tolerance/indifference wasn't available to everyone -- it probably helped to be wealthy enough to do what you want, and to be already established as a respected musician (Carlos actually was and still is world-famous!), and I'm sure it wasn't even as universal for Carlos as she was feeling it to be when she gave that quote in 1979 -- the quote makes me wonder if things have gotten worse over the past few years.
While there's more public acceptance in some quarters, it's also become a much bigger controversy in fact. It's hard to imagine a public figure feeling the kind of "indifference" Carlos described, where it didn't actually effect her career much, it wasn't a big deal to it. It was seen as an oddity, yes, but trans was perhaps not the cultural flashpoint like it is now.
Rather than "even today", I wonder and suspect that some things may actually have gotten much worse than they were in 1979 -- for all kinds of things, actually.
Kind of interesting how electronic music then got taken up by the [ware]house scene which made the form into a kind of social public sharing experience yet was also strongly influenced by gay and trans communities.
I have this two CD compilation of Carlos' work on The Shining, probably a bootleg but how else could I get it? It's quite interesting and I think Kubrick ought to have used more of it.
The Clockwork Orange score still goes hard today. Love it.
This was a good podcast about birth of the synth built by Bob Moog and Don Buchla on each coast of the US.
I was working behind the counter at a booth at Macworld, Boston — maybe 1991 or so? A woman behind the booth with me suddenly said, "That was Wendy Carlos!", about someone who had just walked away from the booth. Dumb me was busy doing something and hadn't been paying attention.
Ha ha, those little moments in life when you're asleep at the wheel.
I still have the vinyl of switched on Bach and one day I'll get a record player hooked up and play it from there instead of the mp3s. Fantastic record and given the time when it was made absolutely incredible, keep in mind that this was before MIDI and most music related software that we take for granted today.
Here's a great podcast about Wendy Carlos
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2MZsp6Bfxf8PnOd7ODRmc4?si=8...
I have an early copy of Switched-On Bach, and I sometimes wonder if I should put a bit of tape on the front. It's probably sufficient to remember, and call her Wendy.
The lengths humans will go through for success will always amaze me
great read and history thanks for sharing OP
No mention of the Momus $22 million lawsuit
I grew up in a very religiously conservative household and was raised to not think "well" of trans people. Simultaneously one of my favorite soundtracks of all time was the music to the original 1982 Tron. I had never heard anything quite like it compositionally, or sonically. Sweeping orchestras blended in with synthetic beeps, and bold vistas. It fit the aesthetic of the movie perfectly and was such a daring film production I can't believe it was even made.
One day I looked up the soundtrack at the local record store and bought it..."Composer Wendy Carlos" huh, never heard of her and couldn't find anything really other than contributions to Clockwork Orange and Hooked on Bach and not much else. I moved on.
Later, when there was more Internet to be had, I decided to look up Wendy and was shocked to learn she was trans. It started me down a journey of reflection, challenging my upbringing, and reexamining many "truths" that I had been taught. Along that journey I learned about the tragedy of Alan Turing and other stories.
Wendy's music planted a seed that significantly transformed my inner life, much for the better. It helped me develop significantly in my thoughts on freedom, empathy, justice and the kind of future world I'd like to live in and leave behind.
In 1982 it took a lot of daring for a Disney exec to green light bringing her music to their audience. This was during an age of great an unjust moral panic on a variety of topics.
for reference: I remember my mother receiving a letter from her pastor outlining why "Back to the Future Part II" was the work of Satan and they should never allow it in their household. The central argument was a table that counted the number of time the seven dirty swear words were mentioned in the movie, challenged its rating, and attributed the low rating (PG I think) to a conspiracy by Satan worshipers to corrupt God's youth. This was 1989.