Wendy Carlos: A Biography by Amanda Sewell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wendy Carlos: A Biography by Amanda Sewell Bradley M. Spiers (bio) Amanda Sewell. Wendy Carlos: A Biography (oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 263 pp. The composer and arranger Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) has long been overlooked by historians of Western art music. Best known for landmark albums like Switched-On Bach (1968) and film scores like A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1971) and Tron (dir. Steven Lisberger, 1982), Carlos fits uneasily into a history of Western music that has long privileged composers over arrangers, art music over popular music, and acoustic instruments over digital interfaces. When Carlos is discussed by music scholars, she is often overshadowed by her better-known male contemporaries like Milton Babbitt (with whom Carlos worked at Columbia's Computer Music Center) or reduced to a transgender stereotype.1 Amanda Sewell's 2020 biography on Carlos, Wendy Carlos: A Biography, offers a first step in complicating this history. Sewell, who works as the music director at Interlochen Public Radio, contextualizes the historical and technological details of Carlos's music with the accessible clarity of a gifted public musicologist and radio host. While not [End Page 226] without its flaws, Wendy Carlos: A Biography starts an important conversation about a composer who is often relegated to the peripheries of twentieth-century music. On the surface, Wendy Carlos is a relatively straightforward recounting of Carlos's life. Sewell speeds chronologically through the most important events of Carlos's biography: her early experiments with computer and musical technologies, her formal composition training at Brown and Columbia Universities, her collaboration with instrument designer Robert Moog, the challenging production and reception of Switched-On Bach, her withdrawal from public life and subsequent return in the eighties and nineties, and her recent work securing her legacy. Throughout these episodes, Sewell focuses on the messy contradictions of a composer struggling against the aesthetic and gendered biases that underlay Western music, music-making, and music makers in the late twentieth century. Sewell portrays Carlos as a figure yearning for digital simplicity amidst the chaos of an analog world, an impulse she articulates throughout the biography as Carlos's First Law: "For every parameter that you CAN control, you MUST control" (3, 24, 174). Sewell documents numerous musical and technological evolutions of this First Law through an array of electronic technologies—tape splicing, analog and digital synthesizers, MIDI controllers, computers, and audio formats like LP records, CDs, MP3s—each achieving greater control over an ever-expanding array of sonic parameters. For Carlos, electronic music-making freed composers and performers from the acoustical and cultural limitations of Western timbre and temperament. On tracks from her 1986 album Beauty in the Beast, for example, she used digital synthesis not only to recreate the five-note slendro and pelog tunings of Balinese gamelan, but also to produce original, microtonal tunings, including her alpha (with 15.3 notes per octave) and beta (with 63.8 notes per octave) scales. The result, explains Sewell, was an acoustical nuance impossible on most traditional instruments. Paradoxically, Carlos is best known for Switched-On Bach—an album that features electronic instruments simulating a traditional baroque orchestra. Nevertheless, Sewell hears continuities between Carlos's work on tuning and timbre and J. S. Bach's experimental sensibilities and emphasizes her professed kinship with the baroque master. Carlos explains that [End Page 227] if Bach were alive in the late twentieth century, he likely would have used a synthesizer "to overcome the 'limitations' of equal temperament."2 Sewell struggles, however, to present Carlos's compositions outside a Western art music context, often neglecting her outsized influence on popular music. Albums like Switched-On Bach and scores for films like A Clockwork Orange, The Shining (dir. Kubrick, 1980), and Tron are often presented uncritically as classical compositions written for classical or specialist audiences.3 Other scholars, such as Roshanak Kheshti in her recent 33 1/3 study on Switched-On Bach, have noted that the reality of Carlos's reception was not only more complicated but more interesting.4 Carlos's efforts on Switched-On Bach not only precipitated a flood of lesser imitators—The Moog Strikes Bach (1970), Switched-On Rock (1969), Music to...