Wendy Carlos

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Wendy Carlos (* 14. November 1939 as Walter Carlos in Pawtucket , Rhode Iceland ) is an American composer and electronic musician .

Life

Wendy Carlos, who started playing the piano at the age of six, showed a talent for science at an early age and won a Westinghouse Science-Fair scholarship for a computer she built at home. She first studied music and physics at Brown University in Providence , later composition at the first center for electronic music at Columbia University in New York with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevski .

Carlos is one of the first famous interpreters of electronic music. In 1968, Switched-On Bach , which contained electronically generated versions of works by Johann Sebastian Bach , was one of the first albums to use electronic synthesizers as an alternative to an orchestra. As Robert Moog's assistant in the development of his first commercially available synthesizer , Carlos was able to advance the technology of sound synthesis . Switched-On Bach became the best-selling classic album to date and won three Grammy Awards .

In 1972, after extensive preparation, Carlos underwent gender reassignment surgery and officially changed the name to Wendy Carlos on Valentine's Day 1979. She released her first record under a new name in 1979 with Switched-on Brandenburgs .

In 1980 she created the score for the Stephen King film adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's Shining with Jack Nicholson in the lead role after she had written the music for the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange in 1972. In 1982 she composed the soundtrack for the Walt Disney production Tron .

On Beauty In the Beast from 1986, Wendy Carlos experimented with extreme alternative moods . One of the scales she developed for the album contains 144 notes per octave .

Awards

Discography

  • Walter Carlos: Switched-On Bach (published in Germany with the subtitle: "Baroque Revolution or the Strange Adventures of J. S. Bach in the Land of Electrons") (1968)
  • Walter Carlos: The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969)
  • Walter Carlos: Sonic Seasonings (1972)
  • Walter Carlos: A Clockwork Orange (Soundtrack, 1972)
  • Walter Carlos: Switched-on Bach II (1974)
  • Walter Carlos: By Request (1975)
  • Wendy Carlos: Switched-on Brandenburgs (1979)
  • Wendy Carlos: The Shining: Score Selections (Soundtrack, 1980)
  • Wendy Carlos: Tron (Soundtrack, 1982)
  • Wendy Carlos: Digital Moonscapes (1984)
  • Wendy Carlos: Beauty In the Beast (1986)
  • Wendy Carlos: Land of the Midnight Sun (1986, re-released on Sonic Seasonings )
  • Wendy Carlos: Secrets of Synthesis (1987)
  • Wendy Carlos: Peter and the Wolf (1988, with “Weird Al” Yankovic )
  • Wendy Carlos: Switched-On Bach 2000 (1992)
  • Wendy Carlos: Tales of Heaven and Hell (1998)
  • Wendy Carlos: Switched-On Boxed Set (1999)
  • Wendy Carlos: Switched-On Boxed Set - Highlights (1999, extraction of a cross-section from the Boxed Set)
  • Wendy Carlos: Woundings ( Soundtrack ) (2004)
  • Wendy Carlos: Rediscovering Lost Scores I (2005, previously unreleased parts of the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining )
  • Wendy Carlos: Rediscovering Lost Scores II (2005, previously unreleased parts of the soundtracks for The Shining and TRON )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reference date - November 14, 1939: birthday of the musician Wendy Carlos. November 14, 2019, accessed July 22, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Carlos, Wendy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Carlos, Walter (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American composer and electronic musician
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Pawtucket , Rhode Island