Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos, November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer best known for her pioneering work in the field of electronic music.
During the early 1960s Carlos was instrumental in the development of the Moog synthesizer, the first commercially available electronic keyboard instrument, while studying at New York’s Columbia University/Princeton Electronic Music Center.
Carlos came to prominence with her Switched On Bach album from 1968 where she performs the music of Johann Sebastian Bach on a Moog synthesizer.
According to Carlos, Switched-On Bach took approximately five months and one thousand hours to produce. As the early synthesizers had no keyboard and were monophonic, meaning only one note could be played at a time, each track had to be assembled one note at a time.
While recording the album, her synthesizer was often quite unreliable and frequently went out of tune. Carlos recalled once hitting it with a hammer prior to recording to obtain correct pitch. After several notes were played, it was checked again to make sure it had not drifted out of tune.
The album went on to win Carlos three Grammy Awards and helped popularize the use of the synthesizer in the 1970s. Its commercial success led to several more albums, including further synthesized classical music adaptations, experimental albums and ambient music too.
Both her scores for the Stanley Kubrick films, A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) are highly regarded as well as her score for the 1982 Disney film Tron.
In 1979, Carlos raised public awareness of transgender issues by disclosing she had been living as a woman since 1968, and in 1972 had undergone sex reassignment surgery.
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