Browse: Home / Celebrating the Living: Wendy Carlos

Menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Login

The-SoluteLogo

A Film Site By Lovers of Film

Menu

Skip to content
  • Features
  • Reviews
  • Long Reviews
  • News
  • Articles and Opinions
  • Other Media
  • The Friday Article Roundup: The Truth is In Here
  • Lunch Links: Schwarzfahrer
  • Websites on the Internet: THE SOLUTE
  • New on DVD and Blu-Ray
  • Movie Gifts Holidays 2024

Celebrating the Living: Wendy Carlos

Posted By Gillianren on June 16, 2019 in Features | Leave a response

Few of the people we’ve discussed have been celebrated by NASA. If you go to her delightfully ’90s webpage, you can read what Wendy Carlos has to say about her history of eclipse photography. Indeed, the website appears to be as much about science and her personal philosophy as about how she shaped the world of music. There is nothing at all about her connection to film. To be fair, she hasn’t done many films, though the ones she’s done are iconic.

Wendy Carlos wrote her first composition at age ten and build a computer at fourteen. She attended Brown University to study music, and she was already giving lessons in electronic music. She received her Masters in music composition from Columbia University; while she was a student there, she worked with Leonard Bernstein to present a concert of electronic music. She was an incredibly pioneer in the field; there weren’t a lot of people making electronic music in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

One of the most important connections she made in those years was with Robert Moog. She was one of the contributors toward developing his synthesizer. She’d worked with others before, of course, but Moog’s was the first to use a keyboard. Carlos’s first commercial recording was a demonstration album of the synthesizer’s technical abilities. From there, she released several highly acclaimed albums; her Switched-On Bach was one of the first real electronic recordings and had to be done one note at a time, due to the synthesizer’s limitations.

As I said, she hasn’t done many movies, but she worked twice with Kubrick, on Clockwork Orange and The Shining. She worked for Disney to score the original TRON. (My friends and I joked last night that for all we knew, she worked on the second one as well and is secretly in Daft Punk.) She scored a movie I’ve never heard of called Woundings. And that’s pretty much it. To be perfectly honest, I kind of thought she was dead until I looked her up for Attention Must Be Paid a while back. She’s only 79; that’s almost a full decade younger than John Williams. But she seems to have settled into a mellow lifestyle with her photography.

She also considers about a decade of her life to have been wasted by hiding her transition. When she came out as transgendered and revealed her gender reassignment surgery, she says she was pretty well met with indifference—she thought people would be angry or horrified, but instead, they mostly didn’t care. She’d been so determined to keep it secret that she disguised herself as a man, even drawing on a moustache, and continued to release albums under the name of Walter Carlos. Being open about her identity was a considerable relief.

Keep my passion about my work going; consider supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!

Posted in Features | Tagged Attention Must Be Paid, tribute, Wendy Carlos

About the Author

gillianmadeira@hotmail.com'

Gillianren

Gillianren is a forty-something bipolar woman living in the Pacific Northwest after growing up in Los Angeles County. She and her boyfriend have one son and one daughter, and she gave a daughter up for adoption. She fills her days by watching her local library system’s DVD collection in alphabetical order, watching everything that looks interesting. She particularly enjoys pre-Code films, blaxploitation, and live-action Disney movies of the ’60s and ’70s. She has a Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/gillianren

Related Posts

Life is a mysteryCelebrating the Living: Madonna→

Clearly Pryor knew a thing or two about wooing womenAttention Must Be Paid: Richard Pryor→

Definitely how most people picture him.Celebrating the Living: John Cameron Mitchell→

A sexy hot mess bigot!Attention Must Be Paid: Patricia Highsmith→

  • Comments
  • Popular
  • Most Recent
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleWonderful piece, Sam. It's made…
  • j*****@yahoo.com'
    mr_apollo on Year of the Month: Mon OncleFellow heretic here. I've never…
  • n***********@gmail.com'
    Ruck Cohlchez on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEI wouldn't have called it…
  • j***********@gmail.com'
    Son of Griff on LIFE ITSELFGlad to hear back from…
  • n*********@gmail.com'
    Jake Gittes on Film on the Internet: AN AMERICAN CRIMEThis is the single most…
  • “The End” of SAVAGES

    38372 views / Posted November 10, 2014
  • The Untalented Mr. Ripley: The Craft of Standup Comedy and the Non-Comedy of TOM MYERS

    30712 views / Posted June 26, 2018
  • What the fuck did I just watch? SPHERE

    30334 views / Posted March 19, 2015
  • Gordon with Mr. Looper

    Attention Must Be Paid: Will Lee

    27648 views / Posted January 7, 2023
  • Scenic Routes: SHOWGIRLS (1995)

    23332 views / Posted November 20, 2014
  • The truth is FAR out there.

    The Friday Article Roundup: The Truth is In Here

    December 6, 2024 / The Ploughman
  • This is a way lower res image than I will be allowed to get away with at the new site.

    Lunch Links: Schwarzfahrer

    December 5, 2024 / The Ploughman
  • Websites on the Internet: THE SOLUTE

    December 4, 2024 / ZoeZ
  • New on DVD and Blu-Ray

    December 3, 2024 / Greta Taylor
  • Movie Gifts Holidays 2024

    December 2, 2024 / The Ploughman

Last Tweets

    ©2014 - 2016 The-Solute | Hosted, Developed and Maintained by Bellingham WP LogoBellinghamWP.com.

    Menu

    • Home
    • Who We Are
    • About
    • Privacy
    • Contact Us
    • Login
    Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!