Wendy Carlos: A Biography

Bogus “Bio” Alert

Please be aware there’s a purported “Biography” on me just released. It belongs on the fiction shelf. No one ever interviewed me, nor anyone I know. There’s zero fact-checking. Don’t recognize myself anywhere in th

Bogus “Bio” Alert

Please be aware there’s a purported “Biography” on me just released. It belongs on the fiction shelf. No one ever interviewed me, nor anyone I know. There’s zero fact-checking. Don’t recognize myself anywhere in there—weird. Sloppy, dull and dubious, it’s hardly an objective academic study as it pretends to be.


This slim, mean-sprited volume is based on several false premises. All of it is speculation taken out of context. The key sources are other people’s write-ups of interviews done for magazine articles. There’s simply no way to know what’s true or not—nothing is first-hand.


The book is presumptuous. Pathetically, it accepts as “factual” a grab-bag of online urban legends, including anonymous axes to grind. The author imputes things she doesn’t understand, misses the real reasons for what was done or not done. She’s in way over her head, outside any areas of expertise, and even defames my dear deceased parents—shame!
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Well, now you know, and have the victim’s honest reactions. Wish there were more one could do about needless personal attacks, but we have to understand how essential freedom of speech is, even when it permits such abuse. Have dealt with stereotyping most of my life, a pretty tough hide by now. But aren’t there new, more interesting targets?Unless you consider “academic” books a form of contact sport, you really might want to reconsider your time and money. —Wendy Carlos, August 2020.

From the time she was a child, Carlos was very resourceful. She has attributed her work ethic and creativity to the fact that her family was very poor in the early years of life: if she wanted something, she had to find a way to get it on a shoestring budget. Much like her father had hand-drawn a piano keyboard for her to practice on until the family could afford a real piano, Carlos built things from scratch or otherwise improvised when her family couldn’t afford them. For example, the hi-fi system that her family listened to music on was something Carlos had put together herself. She cut the wood to make the loudspeaker enclosure and used a soldering iron to wire a kit. She also designed some components herself when she wasn’t able to get a kit. When word of her aptitude got around, she began helping older people repair their older equipment or install newer equipment. She has said she was a “smart-ass” and a “nerdy” child who learned skills quickly and enjoyed applying what she had learned. She was similarly scrappy with music, checking out academic books from the library so that she could teach herself about harmony, counterpoint, and tuning and temperament.

She also preferred the company of girls to boys, which resulted in taunts from boys—and worse. Carlos recalled older boys taunting her as early as elementary school with homophobic epithets such as “fairy,” “pansy,” and “sissy.” Although she said didn’t know exactly what those words meant when she was a child, she knew what they implied: freak.

She tried to change her behavior to protect herself, such as carrying her books on her hip (like boys were supposed to do) instead of cradling them in her arms (like girls did). As a child, Carlos wasn’t just called names: other kids threw rocks at her, punched her, and sexually assaulted her. She regularly endured this kind of cruelty and abuse until she graduated from high school; she would continue to fear for her safety for many years.

Moog and others have said Carlos was extremely demanding of him and his synthesizer modules. Indeed, nearly everything Moog manufactured for Carlos during that period was custom and was built to much higher specifications than any of the standard Moog modules being manufactured at the time. Raynold Weidenaar, a former employee at Moog’s Trumansburg factory and the editor of the Moog-sponsored magazine Electronic Music Review, recalled that Carlos “was really holding Moog’s feet to the fire in terms of the way things had to be, and the quality that [she] needed. [She] was a very demanding musician who’s also very knowledgeable technically.”

Some nights, she would ride the subway to Fifth Avenue and simply walk up and down the streets in order to feel surrounded by people. Daily, she considered committing suicide by cutting her wrists with the same razor blade that she used to splice magnetic tape in the studio.

Each piece of music on the album took weeks to create. Carlos recalled that she spent eight hours a day, seven days a week for five months creating this new album—all in addition to her forty-hour a week job at Gotham. Each sound that Carlos produced on her Moog synthesizer required a unique combination of patch cord routings, knob settings, and switch settings. She selected one of four available wave shapes: pulse wave, sawtooth, sine, or triangle. She could add or decrease envelopes to adjust attack time, decay, sustain, and release for each sound. For example, a harpsichord sound would decay almost immediately, while the sound of an organ would be sustained for much longer, just as would happen by playing the physical instruments themselves. Oscillators were adjusted for octaves, and filters could adjust the high and low ends of the sounds. The process was tedious.

[…]

If Carlos was lucky, she has said, she could produce a measure or two of music before the synthesizer went out of tune. She claimed that she sometimes needed to bang on the instrument with a hammer to get it back in tune.

Accounts differ on how much money was offered for the Bach album. Elkind recalled that they were offered $1,000 for the finished master of the album, and Carlos told an interviewer that they were given approximately $2,500 for the master (around $17,000 in 2018). The saving financial grace would come with the royalties. Elkind negotiated what she called “a very nice royalty” because Columbia didn’t appear to take the album seriously enough to expect that it would sell very many copies.

What happens when you’re the artist behind the most popular classical album in the history of recorded music but you can’t appear in public without fear of being the object of ridicule or the victim of physical violence?

For a few months, Carlos tried to appear publicly as “Walter” in order to promote her music, but this approach turned out to be unsustainable. Maintaining the illusion of “Walter” after she had transitioned nearly drove Carlos to attempt suicide. In the very few photos of Carlos from this era, she looks as if she’s wearing some sort of ill-fitting costume and appears anywhere from uncomfortable to miserable.

The cultural impact that Switched-On Bach had in the late 1960s and early 1970s cannot be overstated. It brought an entirely new perspective for how music could be created and heard. The album and Carlos won three Grammy Awards in 1969: Best Engineered Recording, Classical; Best Classical Performance—Instrumental Soloist or Soloists (With or Without Orchestra); and Album of the Year, Classical. The album’s enormous commercial success inspired dozens of copycat albums.

Other musicians were fascinated with the sounds of the synthesizer and wanted to learn how to incorporate those sounds into their studio albums. Some of these artists tried to consult with Carlos, but she refused to meet with them. She recalled hiding in her own home when Stevie Wonder came over to check out her synthesizer and setup; she was afraid to even speak to him because she knew that her voice would give away the fact that she was a woman.

The Carlos soundtrack on Columbia included the uncut, fourteen-minute version of Timesteps as well as extended versions of realizations of music of Beethoven and Rossini that had appeared only in short excerpts on Warner Brothers’ soundtrack album. Columbia’s soundtrack album of A Clockwork Orange also included “Country Lane,” another original piece Carlos had written for the film that Kubrick chose not to include; “Country Lane” had been written for the scene in which Alex’s former droogs, now corrupt police officers, attempt to drown him. A quarter of a century later, Carlos would reissue her music from A Clockwork Orange with even more original compositions for the film that Kubrick had not used, including “Orange Minuet” and “Biblical Daydreams.”

Carlos didn’t spare anyone from critique in her Whole Earth Catalog letter. She stated outright that no synthesizers on the market were sufficient. The Moog was workable but crude, and it was a nightmare to keep in tune. The Tonus, the Buchla, and mini versions of any other synthesizer brands were “cash-in-on-ignorance rip-offs.” Others were “clatter machines,” “contrived,” “wonder toys,” “dull,” “awful,” “flimsy,” and “imbecilic.” She railed against the trendiness that popped up surrounding the Moog synthesizer as a result of her Switched-On Bach album, complaining about everything from the “bullshit artists” that tried to cash in on the synthesizer’s appeal to the ignorance of those who pronounced “Moog” as if it were a sound a cow was making.