Wendy Carlos (born 1939)
Wendy Carlos was born Walter Carlos in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. She started playing piano at age 6 and wrote her first composition at the age of 10. She graduated from Brown University in 1962 with a degree in music, and from Columbia University in 1965 with a master’s degree in composition. She began transitioning to female a few years later.
Wendy Carlos had been involved in electronic music since at least the early 1960s, and she met Robert Moog around that time. She had several suggestions for improving the synthesizers that Robert Moog was building, and her suggestions were incorporated into his later designs. Carlos was an early adapter of the Moog synthesizer. She used it to make sound effects for commercials, and she composed several works for conventional instruments and electronic sounds.
In 1968, Wendy Carlos created the landmark album Switched-On Bach, featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach realized by overdubbing tracks played on a Moog synthesizer. It was a big hit and spent 59 weeks on the Billboard 200 charts.
Although Wendy Carlos has created albums of original compositions (including Sonic Seasonings, Digital Moonscapes, and Beauty in the Beast) she is perhaps better known for her work on the soundtracks to the Stanley Kubrick films A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and for the movie Tron.
It has been difficult to find a reasonable YouTube video of a representative Wendy Carlos composition. In general, she has not allowed her music to be streamed or made available on YouTube. While her scores for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining are well known, these are mostly electronic arrangements of existing compositions.
This wouldn’t normally be my first choice, but here is a suite of the music that Wendy Carlos composed for the soundtrack of “Tron.”