Hi.
Welcome to the Listener’s Guide.
I’m Steve.
I can’t believe it, but it’s already LGBT History Month again!
Last year we talked about Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and I asked for your input
on who to cover next.
There were so many great suggestions, but the one that stood out above the rest was
most definitely Wendy Carlos, a trans composer who has made waves for her innovative use
of synthesizers starting in the mid-twentieth century and continuing to the present.
Unfortunately, the only freely available photo of Ms. Carlos is one pre-transition, and out
of respect for her right to control her image, we will not be able to include any here.
Please do feel free to look her up, though!
Carlos was born in 1939 and showed an early interest in both physics and music.
In fact, in her youth, she built a computer herself and won an award for it!
Way to make me feel inadequate, Wendy.
However, once she started progressing to the higher levels of academia, she decided that
she couldn’t hack it as a physicist and instead turned her focus entirely to music.
As a musician, Carlos had long been fixated on what we call “timbre,” which refers
to the way instruments sound different from each other and the ways you can change sound
on an individual instrument.
Carlos became a recording engineer after studying composition at Columbia, and it was during
that time that she met Robert Moog, a pioneer of early synthesizers.
Given her experience with computers and her knowledge of timbre, she seized the opportunity
to work with Moog and to help develop his product.
This collaboration led to one of her most famous projects, the 1968 album “Switched-On
Bach,” which features synthesized arrangements of famous works by Johann Sebastian Bach.
The album was a smash hit, selling more than a million copies and bringing in three Grammys.
It also led to three high-profile movie soundtracks: The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, and TRON.
All three of these movies helped her develop her synthesizer techniques even further.
A Clockwork Orange, for instance, features a synthesized rendition of Beethoven’s Ode
to Joy, for which she and her creative partners had to literally invent a new vocoder to mimic
the sounds of the chorus.
TRON, similarly, is one of the first projects to incorporate synthesizer music with a live
orchestra, which presented its own challenges to Carlos.
The time period of those projects, however, was also a tumultuous one in Carlos’s personal
life.
She had long known that she was trans, telling People Magazine, “Inside I had the feeling
that I was a little girl...I preferred long hair and girl’s clothes and didn’t understand
my parents treating me like a boy.
I kept my feelings to myself.
It’s a good way to become cuckoo.”
After moving to New York City in the 1960’s, she began seeing famed sexologist Harry Benjamin,
who specialized in trans issues.
She started hormone replacement therapy in 1968, the same year as Switched-On Bach.
Because she was not yet out publicly, original versions of Switched-On Bach were released
under her deadname.
However, its success allowed her to afford gender reassignment surgery in 1972.
Even so, she was not yet out, and appeared in drag in public for many years to avoid
suspicion.
She lived somewhat reclusively at the suggestion of her friends and roommates, who would send
away visitors who wanted to pay their respects to the groundbreaking musician.
Says Carlos, “I accepted the sentence, but it was bizarre to have life opening up on
the one hand and to be locked away on the other.”
However, she finally came out in a 1979 interview with Playboy Magazine, which she viewed as
an American symbol of personal liberation.
The interview itself made a splash, but Carlos recalls not meeting much resistance thereafter
to her identity, saying, “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish,
indifferent…
There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place.
It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
Into the 1980s and 90s, Carlos continued to make new and innovative music.
She became a huge influence on the growing New Age movement in music, and even collaborated
with Weird Al Yankovic on parodies of Peter and the Wolf and Carnival of the Animals.
She has remained active in creating music and releasing albums into the twenty-first
century and has even been updating her website with her hobbies and interests, like worldwide
eclipse-chasing.
So here on the Listener’s Guide, we thank her for her huge contributions to music and
to LGBT history in equal measure.
Who are some of your favorite LGBT musicians you would like us to highlight in the future?
Let us know in the comments!
And guess what else?
We were recently featured in the Dallas Morning News for my videos with the Dallas Opera.
If you’re interested in reading the article, check out the link in the description.
And thanks for watching The Listener’s Guide, which is brought to you by all our lovely
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If you like it, please do consider donating, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe,
and we’ll see you next time on The Listener’s Guide.