Echoes Podcast: Wendy Carlos Switches On 85

Interview Podcast – Echoes

We Celebrate Wendy Carlos' 85th Year in Echoes Podcast

We look back at Wendy Carlos on her 85th Birthday.

This is actually a feature we did for Wendy’s 70th birthday that we redid for her 80th birthday.

You know that a lot of time has passed when your references become dated. With its array of cords and cables crisscrossed in a patchbay, we used to compare it to a telephone switchboard gone crazy. Well, synthesizers don’t look like that anymore, the modular renaissance excepted, and most people under thirty wouldn’t know what a telephone switchboard was unless they watch the TCM channel a lot.

It was 1968 when Wendy Carlos took her Moog synthesizer and applied it to the contrapuntal 18th century music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The album was called Switched-On Bach and it changed the shape of modern music forever. It took synthesizers out of the world of sound effects and the avant-garde and into the mass market. It’s 50 years later and Wendy Carlos first masterwork is now an iconic moment in the history of electronic music. She’s done other great works since. She presaged Brian Eno and Ambient Music with her 1972 album, Sonic Seasonings (from whence we stole the title of our annual Christmas show). Her Beauty in the Beast was a manifesto for the synthesizer in the global village as Carlos digitally hand-crafted her own global orchestra coupling hybrid instruments and timbres that are remarkably true to form, from the roaring Tibetan trumpets that open the album to the Balinese xylophones and suling flutes.

She only did a few film scores, but they are legendary. A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron were signal works in film scoring.

15 Years ago we did a feature on her 70th birthday. In the Echoes Podcast, we updated it for her 80th Birthday drawing from 30 years of interviews with Wendy Carlos. And now, here we are on her 85th. I’d give you links to her recordings, but none of the are available in any form.

Listen to our earlier Podcast on the 50th Anniversary of Switch-On Bach
Read our Post on Four Switched -On Masterworks by Wendy Carlos.