What defines a legend? What constitutes the mythical? A determine well-known, but shrouded in mystique, mentioned more than seen; a history wherein the circulate of memories overshadows the visibility of our bodies. This is genuinely the category of Wendy Carlos, whose name can be acquainted to a few, even though few have met or spoken together with her immediately (in particular not inside the past 15 or so years). Yet if her call isn't always acquainted, her work almost honestly is. Her sounds exceed our get entry to to her individual, an arrangement that thoroughly can be of her own design.
First and main a composer of original tune, she is perhaps most famous nowadays for her work scoring movies, inclusive of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and A Clockwork Orange in addition to the 1982 sci-fi classic Tron. But her first achievement got here with Switched-On Bach in 1969, an album of Bach concertos executed on an analog synthesizer. The album received three Grammys, sold extra than a million copies and become the first classical album to head platinum—a large declaration on the time that the synthesizer turned into a “real” device, and the beginning of a flip in the direction of electronic tune as a medium that would be used across all genres, instead of a single (experimental) style.
Indeed, few humans have had such an influence on digital tune. Though regularly excluded from the professional narrative, Carlos’s paintings with Bob Moog changed into exceedingly influential to the creation of the eponymous innovation that became the Moog Synthesizer (the device Carlos uses on Switched-On Bach). It become Carlos who pushed for accessibility in the tool’s layout—in the form of a touch-sensitive keyboard, a consumer-friendly alternative to the knobs, wires and buttons featured in maximum synths of the time. Soon after, at the dawn of the Nineteen Seventies, Carlos, in conjunction with her longtime collaborator Rachel Elkind, released Sonic Seasonings, an ambient report that predates Brian Eno’s use of the time period “ambient” by using several years. A decade later, she could launch any other pioneering work: Digital Moonscapes, an exploration of virtual synthesis, MIDI and the possibilities of a digital orchestra. Yet Carlos did not see the nation-states of the digital and the “conventional” as ontologically awesome. Instead she presciently counseled closer to a hybrid of the 2, something which has come to fruition in song these days.
Ever groundbreaking, Carlos has remained committed to education about electronic track alongside innovation. Her transparency about her very own musical strategies verified the collaborative instinct that ran via her paintings at the identical time that it modeled her creative prowess. This is most obtrusive inside the album Secrets of Synthesis (1987), wherein Carlos explains, with the charm of her Rhode Island accent, the opportunities of electronic track from orchestral sounds and choral tones to musique concrète, hybrid timbres and the opportunity tunings she believed would represent “the future” of song.
Yet within the beyond decade or so, Carlos has long past underground. She have become an increasing number of silent over time, refusing interviews or even an acknowledgement of her whereabouts, however it become in 2009 that her internet site, once an active interface between Carlos and her fanatics, stopped updating (it still remains the maximum dependable supply of data on her life and work and is well worth a go to—it even features an Escher-style germinating tile pattern produced from the word “Wendy”). At the equal time, her song has end up more and more difficult to locate: virtual copies are hard to come back with the aid of even for purchase, and motion pictures trying to flow Carlos’s music on YouTube or someplace else are quick taken down. In reality, that is the only space where traces of Carlos’s pastime can nonetheless be located: as lately as 2016, she turned into represented in a lawsuit in opposition to those who had used her music of their personal YouTube movies, regularly for humorous ends.
Though her wishes for privateness nowadays should surely be reputable, it is her disappearance from the general public in tandem with the increasing inaccessibility of her tune (specially as we've end up much greater of a streaming tradition within the years on account that Carlos has dropped out of view) that increases questions now not best approximately private legacy but approximately how track must be cared for. Though regularly the question of the separation among an artist and their work hinges at the price of an art work in mild of its maker’s alternatives, Carlos gives a powerful counterpoint: are we allowed to go on appreciating an paintings no matter the artist’s wishes to have it buried? Are we allowed to don't forget what the artist needs forgotten? Can we even understand what she desires besides? To use one in all Carlos’s preferred terms: “Quo vadis,” or “Where will we go from here?”
Though the remnants Carlos has left offer competing and contradictory perspectives on how she would need to be heard these days, one of the ultimate interviews she did offers insights into her own wishes of legacy. In 2007, speaking with fellow composer Frank Oteri, Carlos remarked on how technological breakthroughs within the present have allowed us to revisit works of art of the beyond with new esteem. She says, “we can at ultimate deal with them with diligence, introspection and respect. I hope track, my music, can be treated the same manner.” And some have already taken up an effort to do simply that. Erik DeLuca, a professor of digital track at Brown University (where Carlos received her diploma in physics and track) has created an archive of all of Carlos’s recorded paintings and organizes a listening network engagement project in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (wherein Carlos is at first from), to bring attention—a especially guided, cared for attention—to Carlos’s works. Here, the appreciation of Carlos’s art isn't always hindered via her needs for privateness. As DeLuca says: “It is okay that Wendy Carlos is personal and that she makes her music tough to find; it makes her music more unique.”
Though her last album, ominously titled Tales of Heaven and Hell, become launched in 1998, Carlos—a prototypical polymath—has found other websites wherein her function as a pioneer and innovator should flourish through the years, maximum significantly as an eclipse photographer whose photos had been published by NASA as well as on the duvet of Sky & Telescope, an beginner astronomy magazine. A self-proclaimed “coronaphile,” Carlos has journeyed for the duration of the sector to seize pictures of diverse eclipses, and has even evolved her very own method of composite images which has garnered appreciation by using fellow astronomers.
There is some thing recursive in Carlos’s fascination with the eclipse event and the choice that keeps us asking where Wendy Carlos is these days. Both are tries to seize the unknowable and illustrate the unseen, that which exceeds our perceptive abilties. We are left with a totality seen best in portions, and possibly that is how she constantly wanted it to be. In the last comments of Secrets of Synthesis, Carlos says, “there’s a story attributed to Sir Ernest Rutherford which I’m constantly reminded of. He used to mention: ‘there are best forms of technological know-how: physics and butterfly collecting,’ thanks for allowing me to proportion a few of my preferred butterfly specimens with you.”
This isn't always the primary time Carlos has disappeared from the general public. In 1972, as A Clockwork Orange swept through the cultural zeitgeist, Carlos underwent gender reassignment surgical treatment and without delay pulled faraway from public view to maintain her transition mystery. Her name at start, Walter Carlos, had become acquainted to the public through the fulfillment of her soundtrack work as well as Switched-On Bach, and possibly in order to keep the achievement under that call, her chosen call, Wendy, remained the call best those closest to her knew. However, in 1979, Playboy posted an interview with Carlos that made her transition public and allowed for the album Switched-On Brandenburgs, launched inside the identical yr, to be the first record of hers to brandish the call Wendy Carlos. Though this was surely a turning-factor for Carlos, the interview was now not always the creation into the general public she had trusted Playboy with delivering. By nowadays’s standards the interviewer’s questions aren't best outrageous, however downright insulting. Carlos turned into given the task of instructing the general public approximately “transsexual” identity, including the information of her surgical treatment, even as at the same time an almost complete obfuscation of her important importance as a composer and musical innovator amounted to so many violations of believe (Carlos additionally claims on her website online that she become manipulated into announcing lots of what is published within the interview) that it led her to nearly in no way communicate publicly about her transition again. Though she persisted to release tune inside the years that observed, giving interviews right here and there with those she relied on to hold a focal point on her tune and not her identification, it's far difficult to preserve from wondering if her more latest disappearance from the public is at all related to the first.