Wendy Carlos: Transgender Electronic Music Pioneer

 

 

 

In 1972 Stanley Kubrick released his film A Clockwork Orange, based upon the dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess, which is set in the near future (as it was then). Kubrick commissioned a brilliant young composer, Walter Carlos, for the soundtrack, which had to reflect the leading character’s love of Beethoven while also illustrating his alienation from society. Kubrick had been impressed by Carlos’ immensely popular album ‘Switched-On Bach’ (1969), on which the composer utilised a recent invention – a Moog synthesiser - to ‘re-stage’ Bach’s more familiar music, giving it a fascinating, unearthly, mechanical feel. The album sold more than any other classical record in history and earned the composer three Grammy Awards – for several months the album even eclipsed The Beatles’ sales.  Carlos agreed to Kubrick’s project and the result is one of the most unnerving melding of futuristic sound and vision in movie history: a ravishing, apocalyptic soundscape that is both gorgeous and terrifying. The cold precision of the electronic music perfectly matched Kubrick’s icy directorial fastidiousness. Carlos later went on to compose the soundtrack of Kubrick’s The Shining, to similar chilling effect; and the Disney techno-futurist, part-animation film Tron (1982). Sections of Carlos’ Clockwork Orange soundtrack were subsequently sampled by a number of techno-music producers in the late ‘90s, and became huge anthems for young ravers, whose parents were just kids themselves when the movie was released. 

     Wendy Carlos was born in Rhode Island. She was a child prodigy. She always knew that she was actually a girl in a boy’s body and couldn’t understand why her parents couldn’t also see that. She began playing piano at six-years old and, when she was ten, she wrote ‘Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano’. In 1953, aged fourteen, she designed and constructed a small computer. Three years later she had built a studio in which she could synthesise music and electronics. She began to experiment with ambient sound and atmospheric soundscapes, which she combined with more conventional music, in a way that prefigured Brian Eno’s later experimentations. At 23, she entered Brown University, to study music and physics and to conduct pioneering classes in electronic music. In 1962 she transferred to a Master’s degree at Columbia University, where she was given permission to use the college’s studio to work on her own pieces after hours. During this period she composed ‘Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers’ (1963), ‘Variations for Flute and Electronic Sounds’ (1964) and ‘Episodes for Piano and Tape’ (1964).

     In 1968 she began hormone treatment and started living from day-to-day as Wendy. But professionally she was still billed as Walter and during her occasional performances on stage she disguised herself back as a man, applying make-up to resemble a five o’clock shadow, for instance, and wearing false sideburns and pushing her long hair under a short wig.

 By 1972, she had undergone gender-reassignment surgery and had fully transitioned. But she felt that if her secret was broadly known her career would be finished.  She attended every meeting she had with Kubrick dressed as a man. She says that she could tell Kubrick thought something was odd, but nothing was ever said. At other times she would hide upstairs whenever musicians such as George Harrison or Stevie Wonder called to pay their respects to Walter. They were each told by Rachel Elkind, her long-time producer, that she was not in the country. She has said of this period in her life that it was a sentence that she accepted, but that it was tragic that on one hand her life was opening up even as it was shut away. 

     Eventually, in 1979, she ‘came out’ to Playboy magazine about her transgender status. She chose that magazine because she felt it seemed to have a liberal stance regarding sexuality and unorthodoxy. She later came to regret her choice and denounced the editors. However, upon its publication she received overwhelming support from the general public, who by the end of the 1970s were perhaps becoming more accepting of the unconventional. She has referred to her years in hiding following her transition as a charade and a “monstrous waste of years of my life."

     In 2005, the electronic-music genius, Wendy Carlos, received a SEAMUS (Society for Electronic-Acoustic Music in the United States) Lifetime Achievement Award, in recognition of her lifetime achievement and contribution to the art and craft of electro-acoustic music.