Wendy Carlos - Work

Work

In addition to the aforementioned "Trio for Clarinet, Accordion and Piano," Carlos composed numerous student works. Two which saw later release (on 1975's By Request) are "Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers" (1963) and "Episodes for Piano and Electronic Sound" (1964). Others include "Variations for Flute and Electronic Sounds" (1964), "Episodes for Piano and Tape" (1964), "Pomposities for Narrator and Tape" (1965) and "Noah" (1965), an opera blending electronics and normal orchestra. Her first commercial release was "Moog 900 Series – Electronic Music Systems" (R. A. Moog Company, Inc., 1967), an introduction to the technical aspects of the Moog synthesizer.

Switched-On Bach (1968) was Carlos' break-through album, one of the first to draw attention to the synthesizer as a genuine musical instrument. Multitrack recording techniques played a critical role in the time-consuming process of creating this album, when it was significantly more difficult than it is today. Switched-On Bach was the last project in a four-year-long collaboration with Benjamin Folkman and won gold records for both Carlos and Folkman. The album then became one of the first classical LPs to sell 500,000 copies, going gold in August 1969, and platinum in November 1986. It remained at the top spot on the Billboard Magazine classical album chart for two years and 49 weeks.

A sequel of additional synthesized baroque music, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, followed in 1969. The title is a play on Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. A second sequel, Switched-On Bach II, was released in 1973, continuing the style of the previous two albums, adding a Yamaha Electone organ to the Moog for certain passages in Bach's 5th Brandenburg Concerto.

In 1971, Carlos composed and recorded music for the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess. Additional music not used in the film was released in 1972 as Wendy Carlos' Clockwork Orange. Some portions of her work for this film re-appeared in her Tales of Heaven and Hell in 2003, in movement 3 A Clockwork Black.

She worked with Kubrick again on the score for The Shining (1980), though in the end Kubrick mostly used the pre-existing music by avant-garde composers he had used as guide tracks. Carlos' contributions would finally see release 25 years later, in 2005.

Sonic Seasonings (1972) was packaged as a double album, with one side dedicated to each of the four seasons, and each side consisting of one long track. The album blended field recordings with synthesized sounds, occasionally employing melodies, to create an ambient effect. Though not as popular as Carlos' earlier albums, it was extremely influential on other artists who went on to create the ambient genre.

In 1982, she scored the film Tron for The Walt Disney Company. This score incorporated orchestra, chorus, organ, and both analog and digital synthesizers. Some of her end-title music featuring the Royal Albert Hall Organ was replaced with a song by Journey, and the music that originally was composed for the lightcycle scene was dropped. Digital Moonscapes (1984) switched to digital synthesizers from the analog synthesizers that were the trademark of her earlier albums. Some of the unused material from the Tron soundtrack was incorporated into it.

Beauty in the Beast (1986) saw Carlos experimenting with various tunings, including just intonation, Balinese scales and several scales she invented for the album. One of her scales, the Harmonic Scale, involved setting a "root note", and retuning all of the notes on the keyboard to just intonation intervals from the root note. There are a total of 144 possible notes per octave in this system: 12 notes in a chromatic scale times 12 different keys. Other scales included Carlos' Alpha, Beta & Gamma scales, which experimented with dividing the octave into a non-integral number of equally-spaced intervals. These explorations in effect supplemented the more systematic microtonal studies of the composer Easley Blackwood, Jr., whose etudes on all twelve equal-tempered scales between 13 and 24 notes per octave had appeared in 1980.

Secrets of Synthesis (1987) is a lecture by Carlos with audio examples (many from her own recordings), expounding on topics she feels to be of importance. Some of the material is an introduction to synthesis, and some (e.g., a discussion of hocket) is aimed at experienced musicians. This release harkens back to The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music by Beaver & Krause, some 20 years earlier.

Beginning in 1998, all of her catalog was digitally remastered by Wendy herself, requiring that she retrieve and in some cases purchase her masters from Columbia Records. In 2005, the two-volume set Rediscovering Lost Scores was released, featuring previously out-of-print material, including the unreleased soundtrack to Woundings, and music composed and recorded for The Shining, Tron and A Clockwork Orange that was not used in the films. These reissues have since gone out-of-print because of changes to the music business involving ESD.