Pride Spotlights: Wendy Carlos

For our next Pride Spotlight, ​​we are shining a light on a truly innovative individual from classical music: Wendy Carlos.

Image sourced from https://www.wendycarlos.com/

An influential electronic musician and film score composer, she is the musician behind the three-time Grammy winning album Switched-On Bach—an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach performed on a Moog synthesizer. Carlos collaborated with Robert Moog, whom she met while she was completing her Masters in music composition at Columbia University, After graduating from Brown University with a degree in music and physics, Carlos went on to receive a Master’s degree in music composition from Columbia, during which she met Robert Moog, who collaborated with Carlos to develop the Moog synthesizer.

The unexpected commercial and critical success of Carlos’s Switched-On Bach a few years later helped to draw attention to the synthesizer as a genuine musical instrument, and it was the second ever classical album to go Platinum. After the success of her first album, she went on to compose and record eleven more albums—some featuring previously composed works reimagined for synthesizer, and others showcasing original compositions by Carlos herself In addition to scoring Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, Carlos teamed up with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the UCLA Chorus, and the Royal Albert Hall Organ to create the soundtrack for Disney’s Tron in 1982. Carlos was a pioneer of the new-age and ambient music genres, inspiring countless musicians—classical and otherwise—who came after her.