WALTER CARLOS
Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos November 14, 1939) is an American composer and electronic musician. Carlos first came to prominence in 1968 with Switched-On Bach, a recording of music by J.S. Bach assembled phrase-by-phrase on a Moog synthesizer, at the time a relatively new and unknown instrument. The album earned three Grammy Awards in 1969. Carlos later began releasing original compositions, including the first-ever album of synthesized environmental sounds, Sonic Seasonings (1972) and also in film music, notably writing and performing scores for two Stanley Kubrick movies, A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980), as well as Walt Disney’s Tron (1982). (More from Wikipedia)
See Also: Wendy Carlos
The first truly audacious use of synthesizers was probably the 1968 album by Walter Carlos called Switched-On Bach, the first classical album to sell one million copies.
Walter Carlos continued to release synthesizer albums for many years – including the soundtrack for the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange – though none had the impact of Switched-On Bach.
I noticed an album several years later that was by Wendy Carlos, and I wondered if that might be Walter’s daughter. As it turned out, Carlos is a transsexual who had begun living as a woman in May 1968 and had sexual reassignment surgery in 1972; reissues of her work all have Wendy Carlos on them now.
(March 2012)
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But I likely will keep putting out what I call the “Story of the Month” (I have my web pages broken down into short “Items” and longer “Stories” on whomever or whatever I am talking about) that I uncover as I load up the web site. These Stories are on well known (well, better known anyway) songs and albums and rock bands and other topics that are not of the Under Appreciated variety. I started those last year and meant to list the ones in my year-end post last time but forgot, so here is that list from the past two years:
December 2013 – The Standells
January 2014 – (skipped)
February 2014 – Hasil Adkins
March 2014 – Bobby Darin
April 2014 – Nuggets
May 2014 – The Nerves
June 2014 – The Outsiders (American band)
July 2014 – The Million Dollar Quartet
August 2014 – Scientific Proof of the Existence of God
October 2014 – Walter/Wendy Carlos
November 2014 – The Trashmen
December 2014 – John Birch Society Blues
January 2015 – John Mellencamp
February 2015 – Child Is Father to the Man
March 2015 – Dion DiMucci
July 2015 – “Lola”
August 2015 – Bob Dylan the Protest Singer
(Year 6 Review)
