W. Carlos is a type-setter and interprets electronic music American.

Walter Carlos was born the November 14th 1939 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and changed sex into 1969 to become Wendy Carlos , which is its current name; this fact is little known because Wendy Carlos revealed his change of sex only in 1979 and does not mention it in its biography; its first works, diffused initially under the name Walter Carlos, were republished under the name Wendy Carlos.

Carlos was very early attracted as well by the music as by electronics, composing at age the ten years a trio for clarinet, accordion and piano and designing four years later its first computer. At seventeen years, Carlos creates an electronic music studio in which it handles sounds recorded on tapes and thus composes his first electronic topics. From 1958 to 1962, Carlos studies the music and physics in Brown University. He will pass then to the University of Columbia where he will work until 1965 in “Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center” and will assist even Léonard Bernstein in a concert of electronic music in Philarmonic Hall of Lincoln Center.

Wendy Carlos is known to have interpreted works of J.S. Bach and other type-setters baroques and traditional on a modular Synthétiseur Moog. In 1968, the electronic musical instruments were still confined with the experimental music or certain rock groups progressive like Pink Floyd, and the exit of the disc Switched one Bach (which one can translate by “connected Bach”) revealed for the first time the sounds of the synthetizer to the general public. This innovation as well as the real talent of musician of W. Carlos made that Switched one Bach is the disc of classical music (in the broadest sense of the term) having been greatest popular success.

Wendy Carlos largely contributed to the development of the modular Synthétiseur Moog by its collaboration with Robert Moog.

The talent of musician of W. Carlos was recognized by his pars: Switched one Bach was recognized “disc of the decade” by the pianist and specialist in Bach Glenn Gould: “ Carlos' S realization off the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto is, to could it bluntly, the finest performance off any off the Brandenburgs - live, canned gold intuited - I' ve ever heard. ”

Wendy Carlos is also the author of the original soundtrack of the film Clockwork orange , containing classical music interpreted on a modular synthetizer Moog, like those of Shining and Tron .

Anecdotes

• In the film Clockwork orange , the cats present in the scene of the murder are the property of Wendy Carlos.

• Wendy Carlos was a large friend of Robert Moog.
• the album Switched one Bach was the album more sold in 1968, all categories of confused traditional discs, although this album had been carried out entirely with the synthetizer.
• the first titles achieved by means of a synthetizer are not on the album “Switched one Bach” but two arrangements carried out in 8 tracks at the request of Robert MOOG to praise the merits of its invention: “What' S new Pussy Cat” of Burt Bacharach and “Eleanor Rigby” of Beatles which one finds on the album “By Request”.

External bond

• Official site

Simple: Wendy Carlos