Book Review: Wendy Carlos, a biography.

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Wendy Carlos - A Biography, by Amanda Sewell.
Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (September 2, 2020) Hardcover.

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I just started reading a new biography of Wendy Carlos (who--back in 1968, rocked the world with the release of the album Switched On Bach, which featured synthesized versions of Johan Sebastian Bach's classical masterpieces on the then-revolutionary Moog Synthesizer--under the name Walter Carlos). Water Carlos was Wendy's legal name at the time. She had changed her gender to female the year before making the album (at the age of twenty-eight).

Here are some reviews of the book (which is also available as a Kindle edition, but the illustrations have been drastically reduced in size, compared to the hardcover University Edition.

Editorial Reviews
Review

"[Sewell] demonstrates that [Carlos] was as important to the success of the Moog synthesizer as the Moog was for her, that she was a pioneering artist in ambient music as well, and that she dismissed being pigeonholed for her synthesized Bach... A balanced biography that gives credit where it is due."--Kirkus

"[Sewell] successfully pulls together a balanced portrait that acknowledges Carlos's unavoidable cultural status as both a pioneer of electronic music and its most famous transgender woman, while also affording due recognition to her sonic accomplishments."--The Wire

"Sewell's nuanced biography of an overlooked composer is our best look yet at this groundbreaking artist, and a reminder that art can and should speak for itself."--Library Journal

"An essential read-not only for electronic music fans, but for anyone interested in the history of gender and popular culture."--4Columns

"Sewell's research is impeccable... an entertaining, often revelatory work, truly befitting a legend and a trailblazer."--Popmatters

"Excellent... A brilliant and trailblazing artist, Carlos herself is fascinating enough, but it's the intersection of her life with other historical currents that makes Sewell's account especially compelling."--Exclaim!

"Amanda Sewell's new biography does Carlos's musical legacy belated justice... Sewell's narrative also strikes a skillful balance to reveal how a spectrum of biases shaped the course of her career, and just as unfairly shapes how listeners understand her music to this day."--Washington Post, Michael Andor Brodeur

"A dramatic illustration of the difficulty of telling stories about the origins of electronic music--of looking for narrative in its halting complexity, for the personal in its rigid impersonality."--Harper's Magazine

"A grounded, thoughtful, appreciative study that maintains focus on its subject and her milieu, all the while paying the reader the courtesy of elegant prose."--Wall Street Journal

"Measured and thorough, a careful, sympathetic, and detailed portrait of a figure who changed the course of electronic music and then, just as it began to proliferate at an unprecedented pace in the 21st century, disappeared."--The Nation

"An important account that helps us understand the legacy of an underexposed trailblazing composer. It also offers readers much in the way of how transgender people have historically been treated and represented, including at the hands of the tastemakers in popular culture."--Washington Post, Karen Iris Tucker
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As a teenager I purchased Switched-On Bach when it first came out (I still have it!) and I continued to purchase Carlos' albums whenever they came out. Then Walter Carlos disappeared and stopped releasing albums. In 2009, Wendy Carlos removed all her albums and recordings from the marketplace, including te soundtracks she composed and released for the movies Clockwork Orange, Beauty and the Beast, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and Disney's Tron. She has not updated her website since 2009.

This is an amazing book and I am learning a lot about an icon who tried to stay in the shadows when her first album hit the charts and then retreated from the public eye (Carlos has written that she felt the media has treated her like a talking dog and not as an accomplished artist, musician, and inventor--she worked with inventor Robert Moog to develop the Moog Synthesizer which she used to record Switched-On Bach).

Comments

Interesting lady.

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Angharad's picture

She sounds to have been an impressively clever woman, but with Bach's music which seems to attract mathematicians and physicists because the structure of it, and she was a physicist and musician so it seems fitting. It appears she had some issues over her transsexualism but then this was back in the 1970s about the time April Ashley was being shafted by the British legal system, and things were more hostile or less understanding. She was a pioneer in many ways both musically and in her gender change. The write up in wiki is a reasonable assessment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos

Angharad

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