WENDY CARLOS: Transgender Composer and Electronic Music Pioneer

“Those who aren’t sexually at peace with themselves tend to be the most uptight around me.”

TRQ: Wendy Carlos Born November 14, 1939

Composer and musician Wendy Carlos made her name through her pioneering work with Moog synthesizers, keyboards, and Vocoders to composing music. She brings an experimental approach to making classical and ambient music. Carlos created soundtrack music for Disney’s Tron (1982) as well as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). 

Born Walter Carlos in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on November 14, 1939, she grew up in a working-class household. Her family was musical: her mother was a singer who played the piano, her uncles played the trombone, trumpet, and drums. Carlos started playing piano at age 6. By age 10, she had composed “A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano,” her first. 

She attended the Catholic high school, St. Raphael Academy. There, she built a scholarship-winning computer for the Westinghouse Science Fair in 1953. As a student at Brown University, she taught electronic music lessons and graduated with a degree in music and physics in 1962. She enrolled at Columbia University to earn her master’s in music composition. She graduated in 1965, and assisted Leonard Bernstein’s electronic music event at the Philharmonic Hall. 

During her years at Columbia, Carlos met Robert Moog at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and helped with the development of the Moog keyboard. By 1966, she was using the Moog keyboard to record music and effects for television commercials. Newly signed to Columbia Masterworks in 1968, she released the well-received, Grammy- winning Switched-On Bach. Certified Platinum in 1986, the album stayed at the top of the US Billboard Classical Albums chart for over 2 years. It popularised the Moog synthesizer for the next decade. 

As a child, Carlos experienced gender dysphoria. “I was about five or six… I remember being convinced I was a little girl, much preferring long hair and girls’ clothes, and not knowing why my parents didn’t see it clearly.” 

Not until her graduate years at Columbia did she discover transgender studies that brought her a new sense of self-understanding. In 1967, before releasing her first album, Carlos sought counseling from sexologist and transgender advocate Harry Benjamin, author of The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966). 

That year Carlos befriended Rachel Elkind, a singer and the secretary for president of Columbia Records, Goddard Lieberson. Carlos and Elkind moved in together, sharing a home and studio in Manhattan West Side brownstone. The two worked together for over a decade. 

Benjamin guided Carlos through hormone replacement therapy in 1968, which altered her appearance. She panicked over appearing in public once Switched-On Bach became a surprise hit. She wore a man’s wig and fake sideburns for a promotional performance with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. She did the same when meeting Kubrick for the first time, and in 1970 when appearing on The Dick Cavett Show. 

Carlos worked on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), first composing “Timesteps” after reading the book. The soundtrack was released in 1972 and combined music by Beethoven, Henry Purcell and Gioacchino Rossini with vocoders and Moog synthesizers. 

In May 1972, Carlos underwent sex reassignment surgery. However, she released Switched-On Bach II (1973) and By Request (1975) as Walter Carlos for marketing purposes. She released albums as Wendy Carlos after she revealed her transgender identity in an interview with Arthur Bell in Playboy magazine May 1979. 

Looking back in 1985, she acknowledged, “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent… There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.” 

Carlos continued producing electronic and synth music in classical, ambient, and experimental genres. She collaborated with Kubrick and Elkind again for The Shining (1980), to create the main title theme and the track “Rocky Mountains.” Her work on this soundtrack includes an interpretation of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. 

Following their work on The Shining, Elkind moved to France with her husband, and Carlos found a new business partner, Annemarie Franklin. The newly remodelled studio included a Faraday cage to remove interferences from outside noises and electromagnetic disturbances. 

Together, Carlos and Franklin worked on the Tron: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1982) for The Walt Disney Company. They combined synthesizers with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Albert Hall Organ, and the UCLA Chorus. 

In 1998, Carlos composed the soundtrack for Roberta Hanley’s Brand New World, a film based on Jeff Noon’s play. She also released the studio album Tales from Heaven and Hell (1998), as well as the Switched-on (1999) Box Set featuring digital remasters of her synthesised classical albums. 

In 2005, Carlos released Rediscovering Lost Scores, making available unused music recorded A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron. That year, she won the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. 

In 2020, Amanda Sewell published Wendy Carlos: A Biography, which features no first-person interviews with anyone close to Carlos. On her website, Carlos derides the book as “sloppy, dull and dubious” fiction. This commentary is the website’s most recent update. Until March 2009, Carlos posted updates on her discography, information on historical synthesiser and Vocoder technologies, her extensive solar eclipse photography, and images of her past musical collaborators. 

About the Authors

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore.

Sources:

PinkNews

The Guardian

them

TransasCity