Amanda Sewell

I’m not surprised that Wendy Carlos would say something. I’m just sad that she’s not communicated publicly since 2009.

I stumbled across this on her site:

Bogus “Bio” Alert

Please be aware there’s a purported “Biography” on me just released. It belongs on the fiction shelf. No one ever interviewed me, nor anyone I know. There’s zero fact-checking. Don’t recognize myself anywhere in there—weird. Sloppy, dull and dubious, it’s hardly an objective academic study as it pretends to be.

This slim, mean-sprited volume is based on several false premises. All of it is speculation taken out of context. The key sources are other people’s write-ups of interviews done for magazine articles. There’s simply no way to know what’s true or not—nothing is first-hand.

The book is presumptuous. Pathetically, it accepts as “factual” a grab-bag of online urban legends, including anonymous axes to grind. The author imputes things she doesn’t understand, misses the real reasons for what was done or not done. She’s in way over her head, outside any areas of expertise, and even defames my dear deceased parents—shame!
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Well, now you know, and have the victim’s honest reactions. Wish there were more one could do about needless personal attacks, but we have to understand how essential freedom of speech is, even when it permits such abuse. Have dealt with stereotyping most of my life, a pretty tough hide by now. But aren’t there new, more interesting targets?Unless you consider “academic” books a form of contact sport, you really might want to reconsider your time and money. —Wendy Carlos, August 2020.

wendycarlos.com; all formatting is Carlos’s.
I’m not surprised at Carlos’s attack against the author. Carlos called her First Law this: ‘For every parameter that you can control, you must control.’

I’ve read the book that Carlos refers to, which is Amanda Sewell’s Wendy Carlos.

People should say a lot about Carlos, which is, sadly, not the case.

Not only did she popularise the synthesizer but she designed a lot of it and built parts for it from scratch. She learned musical theory and quickly tired of regular tunings. Her original compositions are about as breathtaking as her phenomenally put-together Switched-On Bach.

Without Carlos, no Daft Punk. No Kanye West. No Kraftwerk. No EDM. At least not as we know a lot of electronic-based music nor musical genres today.

The book comes at a special time, when music is throwaway and artists are forced to fight for their lives to make their music, no thanks to companies like Spotify.

I first discovered Carlos when I was fifteen years old and saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The film took me over completely but its soundtrack was something completely different: I bought it on CD and listened it to pieces, again and again. I didn’t—and still don’t—appreciate Beethoven very much, but Carlos’s craft and how she’d made every small piece of the old music come alive was nuts.

This book is carefully constructed using a lot of sources, but not anything in communication with Carlos herself.

As such, Sewell is presenting her biography for what it is: a quilt of sorts, constructed from old interviews that others have done with Carlos, Carlos’s writings from her own site, interviews that others have done with Carlos’s collaborators—perhaps most notably Rachel Elkind—and writings by Carlos and other people.

Still, it’s not for me to feel that Sewell both admires and reveres Carlos. I think she’s done fantastically with piecing together this, a biography that shows Carlos’s extremely enjoyable and valuable artistic work, along with the good, the bad, and everything in-between.

Of course Carlos doesn’t agree with this book; She chose not to take any active part in constructing it, and she’s vehemently against it. I think Carlos is wrong in saying there’s ‘zero fact-checking’ because references to quotes are everywhere in the book; I’ve not checked their veracity, but I’ve a hard time to think Sewell has sewn together a falsehood just to hurt Carlos.

Believe me when I say Sewell instead paints quite a beautiful and multi-faceted portrait of Carlos rather than a vulgar picture or a hagiography.

I don’t think claiming Carlos to be one of the most important electronic-musical artists of the 20th century is hyperbole. She paved her own way in quite a few different areas.

From the time she was a child, Carlos was very resourceful. She has attributed her work ethic and creativity to the fact that her family was very poor in the early years of life: if she wanted something, she had to find a way to get it on a shoestring budget. Much like her father had hand-drawn a piano keyboard for her to practice on until the family could afford a real piano, Carlos built things from scratch or otherwise improvised when her family couldn’t afford them. For example, the hi-fi system that her family listened to music on was something Carlos had put together herself. She cut the wood to make the loudspeaker enclosure and used a soldering iron to wire a kit. She also designed some components herself when she wasn’t able to get a kit. When word of her aptitude got around, she began helping older people repair their older equipment or install newer equipment. She has said she was a “smart-ass” and a “nerdy” child who learned skills quickly and enjoyed applying what she had learned. She was similarly scrappy with music, checking out academic books from the library so that she could teach herself about harmony, counterpoint, and tuning and temperament.

At age 14, Carlos built a computer and won a Westinghouse Science competition for it.

At the same time, she was struggling with her sexuality.

She also preferred the company of girls to boys, which resulted in taunts from boys—and worse. Carlos recalled older boys taunting her as early as elementary school with homophobic epithets such as “fairy,” “pansy,” and “sissy.” Although she said didn’t know exactly what those words meant when she was a child, she knew what they implied: freak.

She tried to change her behavior to protect herself, such as carrying her books on her hip (like boys were supposed to do) instead of cradling them in her arms (like girls did). As a child, Carlos wasn’t just called names: other kids threw rocks at her, punched her, and sexually assaulted her. She regularly endured this kind of cruelty and abuse until she graduated from high school; she would continue to fear for her safety for many years.

Carlos started composing music on her computer and met Robert Moog in 1964.

Moog and others have said Carlos was extremely demanding of him and his synthesizer modules. Indeed, nearly everything Moog manufactured for Carlos during that period was custom and was built to much higher specifications than any of the standard Moog modules being manufactured at the time. Raynold Weidenaar, a former employee at Moog’s Trumansburg factory and the editor of the Moog-sponsored magazine Electronic Music Review, recalled that Carlos “was really holding Moog’s feet to the fire in terms of the way things had to be, and the quality that [she] needed. [She] was a very demanding musician who’s also very knowledgeable technically.”

Carlos had so many synth modules that she required two power supplies to run them. She not only required Moog and his team to build her customised modules, but a customised system. She made money by making music for TV commercials and, in 1968, her home studio is where she made Switched-On Bach, a milestone in electronic music.

Carlos seems to have been very lonely; again, her own words, via interviews (other than to Sewell):

Some nights, she would ride the subway to Fifth Avenue and simply walk up and down the streets in order to feel surrounded by people. Daily, she considered committing suicide by cutting her wrists with the same razor blade that she used to splice magnetic tape in the studio.

One easily understands Carlos’s loneliness and empathises with her. It’s horrific to hear about her state at the time, knowing she was female but that her body wasn’t in sync with reality.

She was helped by Harry Benjamin, ‘a German-American endocrinologist and sexologist who was one of the most respected experts on medical treatments of transgender individuals in the world’.

At that time, Carlos met Rachel Elkind. They formed a strong friendship and professional-working relationship.

To say Switched-On Bach was time-consuming to create is a severe understatement:

Each piece of music on the album took weeks to create. Carlos recalled that she spent eight hours a day, seven days a week for five months creating this new album—all in addition to her forty-hour a week job at Gotham. Each sound that Carlos produced on her Moog synthesizer required a unique combination of patch cord routings, knob settings, and switch settings. She selected one of four available wave shapes: pulse wave, sawtooth, sine, or triangle. She could add or decrease envelopes to adjust attack time, decay, sustain, and release for each sound. For example, a harpsichord sound would decay almost immediately, while the sound of an organ would be sustained for much longer, just as would happen by playing the physical instruments themselves. Oscillators were adjusted for octaves, and filters could adjust the high and low ends of the sounds. The process was tedious.

[…]

If Carlos was lucky, she has said, she could produce a measure or two of music before the synthesizer went out of tune. She claimed that she sometimes needed to bang on the instrument with a hammer to get it back in tune.

I remember members of Kraftwerk talking about going on tour in the 1970s. They played in India where the heat and humidity made synthesizers go out of tune in a very short while. And here’s Carlos, basically helping to invent—and herself creating modules and computers from scratch—Moog’s synthesizer while splicing magnetic tape together to record an album of Bach’s at-times complex music. Imagine EDM kids having to work under those circumstances. I wonder what music would be produced today if it were.

I was happy to read that Carlos and Elkind got nice royalties for the album:

Accounts differ on how much money was offered for the Bach album. Elkind recalled that they were offered $1,000 for the finished master of the album, and Carlos told an interviewer that they were given approximately $2,500 for the master (around $17,000 in 2018). The saving financial grace would come with the royalties. Elkind negotiated what she called “a very nice royalty” because Columbia didn’t appear to take the album seriously enough to expect that it would sell very many copies.

At the time, her record company flaunted her as ‘Walter Carlos’, the name she had been given at birth. She did not want this, but the alternative was far more harrowing.

What happens when you’re the artist behind the most popular classical album in the history of recorded music but you can’t appear in public without fear of being the object of ridicule or the victim of physical violence?

I can’t even fathom that. Lord.

For a few months, Carlos tried to appear publicly as “Walter” in order to promote her music, but this approach turned out to be unsustainable. Maintaining the illusion of “Walter” after she had transitioned nearly drove Carlos to attempt suicide. In the very few photos of Carlos from this era, she looks as if she’s wearing some sort of ill-fitting costume and appears anywhere from uncomfortable to miserable.

And the album?

The cultural impact that Switched-On Bach had in the late 1960s and early 1970s cannot be overstated. It brought an entirely new perspective for how music could be created and heard. The album and Carlos won three Grammy Awards in 1969: Best Engineered Recording, Classical; Best Classical Performance—Instrumental Soloist or Soloists (With or Without Orchestra); and Album of the Year, Classical. The album’s enormous commercial success inspired dozens of copycat albums.

Other musicians were fascinated with the sounds of the synthesizer and wanted to learn how to incorporate those sounds into their studio albums. Some of these artists tried to consult with Carlos, but she refused to meet with them. She recalled hiding in her own home when Stevie Wonder came over to check out her synthesizer and setup; she was afraid to even speak to him because she knew that her voice would give away the fact that she was a woman.

Carlos then started working with Stanley Kubrick, a relationship that would last for two films, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.

The Carlos soundtrack on Columbia included the uncut, fourteen-minute version of Timesteps as well as extended versions of realizations of music of Beethoven and Rossini that had appeared only in short excerpts on Warner Brothers’ soundtrack album. Columbia’s soundtrack album of A Clockwork Orange also included “Country Lane,” another original piece Carlos had written for the film that Kubrick chose not to include; “Country Lane” had been written for the scene in which Alex’s former droogs, now corrupt police officers, attempt to drown him. A quarter of a century later, Carlos would reissue her music from A Clockwork Orange with even more original compositions for the film that Kubrick had not used, including “Orange Minuet” and “Biblical Daydreams.”

To hear Carlos’s uncut versions of those songs is a wonderful experience.

In 1972, Carlos had gender-confirmation surgery.

She never minced words, sometimes with vexing effects:

Carlos didn’t spare anyone from critique in her Whole Earth Catalog letter. She stated outright that no synthesizers on the market were sufficient. The Moog was workable but crude, and it was a nightmare to keep in tune. The Tonus, the Buchla, and mini versions of any other synthesizer brands were “cash-in-on-ignorance rip-offs.” Others were “clatter machines,” “contrived,” “wonder toys,” “dull,” “awful,” “flimsy,” and “imbecilic.” She railed against the trendiness that popped up surrounding the Moog synthesizer as a result of her Switched-On Bach album, complaining about everything from the “bullshit artists” that tried to cash in on the synthesizer’s appeal to the ignorance of those who pronounced “Moog” as if it were a sound a cow was making.

It’s simple to see how people could easily fall out with Carlos. She stated her mind—and still does, as seen at the start of this review—and doesn’t back down from any fight. She often uses harsh critique to explain what she feels, and this, coupled with her reclusive nature, feels to me like it goes hand in hand: a person who’s been treated unfairly throughout her life, misunderstood, treated like a ‘freak’ (her own description), could easily be a type of person to fight back at any critique with the most visceral and unforgiving stance.

I don’t know Carlos. I’ve never communicated with her. The above are my own guesswork from reading interviews with Carlos and this biography. Her work stands alone and paints a very explanatory picture of her art, which is beautiful, technically supreme, and wondrous in the extreme: her original music is, to me, sometimes sublime in most wonderful ways.

Still, I’d be hard pressed not to think Carlos is the type of person who makes people shy away from her; if you work with her and somehow vex her, you’d know about it.

Sewell kind of puts a finger on the vexing issue in this paragraph:

Her few attempts in the early 1970s to discuss ways synthesizers could be improved, however, were critical to the point of being vitriolic. She may have thought her letters to the editor were full of constructive criticism for the creators of synthesizers and electronic music instruments, but they read as criticism, bordering on insult, of both the products and the people who bought the products. Synthesizer and other electronic music instrument manufacturers were likely uninterested in consulting with a musician who (1) was well known to be a Moog loyalist, (2) harshly criticized the Moog synthesizer in print despite being known as the instrument’s main champion and Bob Moog’s friend and colleague, and (3) trashed their products and the consumers of their products without qualification in print.

Both Kubrick and Carlos were known for their at-times combative nature, although the former was also known to create very intimate bonds with people whom he later could shun (as with Malcolm McDowell, star of A Clockwork Orange).

By the time Carlos spoke with Kozinn in the fall of 1979 about the Switched-On Brandenburgs release, she seems to have known that things with Kubrick and The Shining were likely not going to end well. She said she sent music to Kubrick for his consideration but had not yet signed a contract to provide music for the film. She also told Kozinn that she and Elkind were thinking about releasing an album called “Music Stanley Kubrick Didn’t Use in The Shining.” Her premonition was spot-on, because ultimately Kubrick hardly used any of their music in the final version of the film. Carlos would, a quarter of a century later, release the complete score she had created for The Shining, but with the slightly less combative title “Rediscovering Lost Scores”.

After this, Elkind and Carlos separated; Elkind met a love and physically moved away from Carlos. After this, Carlos went to create another soundtrack for film: TRON:

The first major project Carlos undertook following her separation from Elkind—film score or otherwise—was the soundtrack to the Disney film TRON. Michael Fremer, the film’s music supervisor, contacted Carlos in June 1981 to discuss the project, and she had formally signed on by the end of the summer. Much in the way that TRON combines the live action “real world” and video graphics for the ENCOM mainframe system, Carlos wanted to combine the sounds of the acoustic symphony orchestra with those of both analog and digital synthesis.

In fact, she was initially asked only to provide electronic music for the world inside the video game. When she told Fremer she wanted to write the orchestral music as well as the electronic music, he seemed surprised that she actually knew how to write for an orchestra. Carlos recalled being a bit insulted by the insinuation: “I bristled slightly and said, what do you think my training is?” She told Fremer if she was going to do the score, she was going to do the entire score.

To work like Carlos must have been hell at times. Imagine knowing so much about music, about technologies, about the technicalities, and what you want—having written the entire score—and to try and amend mistakes:

After the recording sessions, Carlos turned to creating the synthesizer parts and marrying the recorded instrumental performances with the synthesizer. She spliced multiple tracks from different takes together to get a single cue that was acceptable to her, she adjusted out-of-tune passages by re-recording passages at faster or slower speeds, and she ultimately discarded some sections that the orchestra had recorded and replaced the passages with synthesizer tracks. She used both her modular Moog and a newer PolyMoog for the analog synthesis along with her new Crumar GDS for the digital synthesis.118 She has said she used the synthesizers three different ways during the postproduction. First, she used it to augment and complement the orchestra’s sounds, which was her original plan for the entire soundtrack. Her other two uses of the synthesizer were the result of her dissatisfaction with the recording sessions. Second, because she wasn’t satisfied with the recordings of the orchestra, she doubled the orchestra’s lines with the synthesizer to improve the sound. Third, she replaced entire sections of the orchestra when she wasn’t happy with the recording, sometimes because the musicians had made a mistake and sometimes because the recording engineer had made a mistake.

To me, Carlos’s approach of amending those recordings reminds me of what Frank Zappa tried to get from the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO): Zappa had made enough music to finally record with them, and scheduled a few days to do it. LSO thought another rock muso was underway, so, ‘Hey, why study any scores? We can probably knock this out in our sleep’. Their issue was Zappa’s complexity; his music was not simple and required a lot of work. So, Zappa was furious with drunk musicians and mistakes they made during the recordings, so he simply edited what needed to be edited in later production phases. He even continued editing recordings for reissues, and partly called this process ‘conceptual continuity’.

There are many exciting parts in this book, along with tense, depressive, joyful, ground-breaking, and wondrous states.

Carlos continues to make music in her home studio, and her website is alive, albeit slightly dormant; her Sewell-bashing mentioned above is the only new thing I’ve found to be published during the last 11 years.

I firmly recommend reading this biography, even if it’s a load of hogwash to Carlos. It regenerated my interest in her music, music from her peers, and in the films that she ignited via her work. If Sewell have written this book only for money—which I don’t believe at all—she’s done a very fine job.

I’ve not covered a lot of what Sewell wrote on Carlos’s sexuality, but I found her writing both respectful and understanding from feministic perspectives.… (plus d'informations)

Wendy Carlos is electronic music composer who specialized in the use of synthesizers, and wrote movie soundtracks including a long collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. When I was in high school, I listened to the music of Walter Carlos, and Walter transitioned to Wendy Carlos. This was in mid 1970s, and most people just commented "oh you can do that?" Noone really cared except for some repressive people who thought it was some kind of disease. Nowadays everyone makes a fuss over Kaitlyn Jenner, and you really wonder why its anyone's business. Wendy Carlos wanted to be remembered for music, not for her gender identity. I have a lot of respect for her, not just for her talent, but for her self assurance in the face of narrow minded people.… (plus d'informations)