Wendy Carlos

Wendy Carlos is an American composer and electronic musician whose synthesizer recordings, especially Switched-On Bach, helped bring synthesizers to a broad audience.

Switched-On Bach: A 1968 album on which Wendy Carlos performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s music using a Moog synthesizer. This landmark recording made Carlos’s synthesizer interpretations widely known.
Moog synthesizer: An electronic musical instrument developed by Robert Moog and his collaborators, using modular circuits to generate and shape sound. Carlos used Moog equipment to realize the performances on her early synthesizer albums.
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: A pioneering electronic music studio founded in New York in 1959 by Columbia and Princeton universities. Carlos studied and worked in the studio environment that shaped her early electronic practice.
Grammy Award for Album of the Year: The Recording Academy’s annual award recognizing an album judged the year’s best. Switched-On Bach became the first classical album to win this award.
The Well-Tempered Synthesizer: A 1969 Wendy Carlos album of Baroque music performed on a Moog synthesizer. Carlos extended her Bach project with a second album of Baroque repertoire.
Multitrack recording: A recording method that captures separate audio parts on distinct tracks for later mixing. Layering separately recorded synthesizer parts made complex arrangements possible.
Robert Moog: An American engineer and inventor whose modular synthesizers helped establish modern electronic music instruments. Carlos collaborated with Moog and helped demonstrate the musical potential of his synthesizers.
Synth-pop: A popular music genre that foregrounds synthesizers, often alongside drum machines and electronic production. Carlos’s prominent synthesizer recordings helped normalize electronic instruments in popular culture.
A Clockwork Orange (soundtrack): Wendy Carlos’s electronic score and adaptations of classical music for Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film. The soundtrack applied Carlos’s synthesizer work to a dystopian film world.
Voltage-controlled synthesizer: A synthesizer whose sound parameters are controlled by electrical voltages. The voltage-control architecture underlies the modular instruments central to Carlos’s early recordings.

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VangelisCompared with: Carlos’s meticulous adaptation of existing music contrasts with Vangelis’s largely original, improvisatory compositions.