I hadn't intended to write about Stanley Kubrick again today. I have to refer to him again, however, in passing because the person who did the music for his films, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, Walter Carlos, was responsible for today's piece. Carlos gets the spotlight today because of her album, released in 1967, Switched-On Bach.
Wait, you might say, didn't he just say "her" when referring to Walter Carlos. Yes, because several years ago Carlos granted an interview to Playboy Magazine to announce that he had undergone a sex change operation, and was now Wendy Carlos. This really has nothing to do with her music, but does raise hell with the pronouns. Carlos probably has done more to change the face of modern music than any other musician, and here's what's unique--she's done so both in the popular and classical realm.
Carlos studied composition at Columbia University and from early on was a proponent of computer music. She became friends and collaborator with the inventor, Robert Moog, who developed a keyboard controller for computers that generated music and thereby created the synthesizer.
Before that, creating computer music--which many of the up and coming late 20th century composers concentrated on--was insanely complicated and time consuming. For example, Peter Schickele once told the story of attending a workshop dedicated to computer music in the early 1960s. The class wrote a simple melody which they gave to the programmer. Several hours later the composers were called into the lab to hear the result. After all that work the product was a mere few seconds of sound.
Moog's first synthesizers had some rather unpleasant limitations--you could only play one note at a time. That pretty much ruled out chords. And to get different sounds, I believe you had to plug chords in and out of what looked like an antique telephone switch board.
Despite those limitations, a number of composers and performers foresaw interesting possibilities. The pianist, Dick Hyman, for example recorded an album called "The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman," which my brother bought and whose novel sounds completely captivated me.
In 1967 Carlos released her album, "Switched-On Bach," from which comes today's piece, the two part invention in D minor. I don't know if Carlos played two keyboards hooked to two separate computers or recorded each hand's part separately and then mixed them together. Either way, Carlos played each incredibly fast, which indicates her virtuosity at the keyboard. The result really shows Bach's almost mathematical and meticulous genius in weaving together two complex and rapid melodies at the same time.
"Switched-On Bach" contains a number of other memorable pieces by Bach as executed by Carlos. Critics lambasted the bastardization of Bach, but the album went platinum, so it obviously appealed to a lot of us "Philistines."
Carlos' collaboration of Moog also resulted in the creation of the Vocorder, which allowed the synthesizing of singing. She used this effectively as part of the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. Interestingly enough, Carlos had composed a piece entitled Timesteps as an evocation her feelings upon reading A Clockwork Orange. By an odd concatenation of events she was introduced to Kubrick, who chose her to do the music for the film.
If Carlos had a dollar for every song that used a synthesizer and every electronic keyboard with a sound library and sampling capabilities, she probably could buy Bill Gates. Just contemplate her influence. In recording "Switched-On Bach," she really transformed the face of both classical and modern music. First, the album made baroque and serious music accessible to a new generation. Second, she gave respectability to the budding field of computer music. With the invention of the microchip, the price of creating music using these new tools fell and popular music still goes on strong. So let's hear if for radical transformations and three cheers for Wendy Carlos.
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