Switched on Pop - Switched-On Wendy Carlos

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

The synthesizer was invented in the 1890s. But for people to really start using it, it took half a century, a musician named Wendy Carlos, and an album called Switched-On Bach. Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan of Switched On Pop tell Phoebe why Wendy Carlos is “the most significant figure in 20th century music that the least people know about.” Subscribe to This Is Love Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. I love synthesizers. They are way more than just the primary instrument in pop music. These machines give musicians an endless set of musical paints to create new sonic colors. I will literally spend hours building patches of unusual bleeps and bloops searching for timbrel gold on my instruments. My love of the synthesizer, though, owes everything to...

Wendy Carlos. She was an early adopter and the creator of the best-selling classical album switched on Bach. Recently, Nate and I were on the wonderful podcast, This Is Love, hosted by Phoebe Judge, who you may know for her other podcast, Criminal. This Is Love is a show about how to be alone, how to live forever, how to wait, how to worry, and yes, how to love. It's a total delight. We love, this is love. You can subscribe in our show notes. We also love Wendy Carlos and The Story of the synthesizer, which we spoke about with Phoebe just the other day. Here's that story. In 1982, an organization called the Musicians Union, representing 40,000 working musicians in the United Kingdom, voted to ban a single instrument, the synthesizer. They were worried

that the synthesizer would replace human musicians, and that one day there could be a future with orchestra pits full of technicians instead of musicians. The synthesizer is created It's a lot of anxiety wherever it goes. People see the synthesizer as replacing human instrumentalists and composers. Musicologist Nate Sloan. People see the synthesizers being a sort of cheap alternative to the great musical traditions of various cultures and places. And people see the synthesizer as something that is sort of mechanical and lifeless. and maybe strips music of some of its inherent humanity.

The first synthesizer was invented in the 1890s, but it didn't become widely used in music until a half century later, largely because of a musician named Wendy Carlos. Did your family have a record collection growing up? Yes. It's very likely that her album switched on Bach was in your record collection. This is Charlie Harding, a songwriter and music journalist.

And if not in yours, definitely in like a family friend or anyone that had a lot of records. It's one of the best-selling records in classical music. How would you describe Wendy Carlos to someone who's never heard of her? Wendy Carlos is the most significant figure in 20th century music that the least people know about. Charlie and Nate have a podcast about pop music. Wendy Carlos has kept her music off of streaming services.

If you want to hear it right now, you can only listen to it if you buy a used physical copy of a CD or record or go to the library. There's very, very little of her work which is available online. In addition, she's also a very reclusive figure who doesn't make a lot of public appearances. So if you're interested in her, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you, you're, It really, it's incumbent on you to sort of go and do that, do that research because she's not, she's not going to find you. You're going to have to find her. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.

So when I, my initial naive reaction to the word synthesizer is, that's like a short cut. That's like annoying. And I don't know exactly what it is, but I don't like it. You know, and it's bad in my head. that's obviously wrong and not true, and I don't know what I'm talking about. But, you know, what is a synthesizer? At its core, a synthesizer is a very flexible instrument

whose job is that it can make a whole plethora of sounds that might be unpleasant bleep-bloop sounds, lots of noise, but it can also imitate the sounds of the orchestra. It is the predominant sound. of contemporary popular music. And it's an instrument that in many ways, I think, tracks the history and development of music and media.

For me, it was a journey to accept the synthesizer. Charlie has probably explained to me a dozen times how synthesis works, how you get the oscillator, and then you have the LFO, and then you add the resonance and the wave. And I literally hear this, and I go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then five minutes later, I'm like, what did he say?

I don't, I really don't understand it. And I really don't use them at all in my own musical practice. I just play a piano. That's like, that's all. I think I had the assumption that the artistry or the creativity or the technique of playing this instrument basically amounted to putting your finger on a button. And then the machine doing most of the work, Like, you know, when someone plays a piano or violin, there's like some physicality.

You can connect the motion of what they're doing to the sound you're hearing. And you see them rip their bow across the strings and you hear the power of that note, right? You don't have that connection with electronic music. And it took me some time, I think, to really embrace the musicality of this. And I remember hearing the Ariana Grande song into you. And I was so blown away by this track and being able to hear the sort of care and attention that this team brought to each of those synthesized sounds. And so by the time I was done listening to it, I was like, this is a composition on the level of anything Johann Sebastian bach did. Every element is perfectly designed to form a seamless hole.

And that was certainly a moment of conversion for me. In 1954, a German musicologist said that the synthesizer sounded like barking hellhounds from a world in which there are no humans. The first synthesizer was called the Telharmonium. It was invented in the 1890s by a man named. Thaddeus Cahill. He wanted to create a machine that could produce perfect tones. He also wanted to broadcast its music through the newly invented phone system. The machine weighed 200 tons. It took two people to play it. In 1905, the telharmonium was brought to New York. Not everyone loved it.

People complained it sounded odd, and musicians found it difficult to play. Sometimes during the broadcast, it would interfere with the phone lines and would start playing in the middle of people's calls. One man complained that while he was talking to his wife, he suddenly heard the William Telovercher. His wife thought he was out at a bar. By the 1910s, the Telharmonium was obsolete, and Thaddeus Cahill was bankrupt. Three decades later, synthesizers had gotten smaller, but they were still big enough that they took up entire rooms, reaching almost to the ceiling. Wendy Carlos first encountered one in the 1960s while she was a graduate student at Columbia University.

She said that using it was so frustrating it required a pint of blood. Growing up in Rhode Island, Wendy Carlos had started taking piano lessons at six, but her parents couldn't afford a piano, so she practiced on a drawing of a piano keyboard. When she was 14, she built her own computer, and won the Westinghouse Science Contest.

As a teenager, she said that the songs that were popular board her. At the time, there wasn't a lot of electronic music. Prior to Wendy Carlos, electronic music as a genre really did exist, frankly. It was more seen as a sort of experimental process that really only took place in these very expensive centers, often housed at universities, which were the only place where you would have the resources and frankly like the physical space to host a giant computer, for instance, or a giant early synthesizer that would create this music. And often the musical results were not particularly musical. They were more in the world of like sound effects or noise experimentation or just sort of like tones and. and sounds rather than like full-fledged musical compositions. And then Wendy heard a song called The Vale of Orpheus.

She tried to make her own piece like it. She built her own tape machine and recorded in the shower for an echo effect. She went on to Brown University. She studied physics. But one of her professors encouraged her to keep going with music and to try to combine the two. and she had the opportunity to basically get access to some very early electronics that would have been very expensive and completely inaccessible to her otherwise to be able to experiment in and sort of build her own degree.

When she got to Columbia for graduate school, she wrote pieces called music for flute and magnetic tape and another called dialogue for piano and two loudspeakers. She said that at the time it was, quote, a deadly thing to play a tape at a concert. She remembered that after hitting play on the tape deck, she could tell audiences felt awkward without any performers on stage.

In grad school, one of her professors told her about a meeting of the Audio Engineering Society, where people were exhibiting new music technology. She took the subway downtown to the Barbizon Hotel where the convention was being held. She came across a booth demonstrating prototypes of a portable synthesizer. Instead of a giant machine, these synthesizers operated on separate modules. One box would be a filter, another could be a controller, and another could be an oscillator.

You could put together different combinations of boxes using cables, and it was all controlled by a keyboard. Next to the booth, she saw a man sleeping. She remembers that she accidentally woke him up. She wrote later, Suddenly I saw a figure stir and rise up to greet me. His name was Bob Moog. He was an inventor. He was an engineer.

He was a businessman. He first started building pheromon kits. The theremin is that very strange space age instrument that you actually never touch. You just sort of wave your hands around it, and it goes like, you know, it's the sound of all sort of sci-fi 1950s. soundtracks.

And Bob Moog, he was a tinkerer who first started building kits of the Theraman, which became popular in recordings of the Beach Boys. Good Vibrations uses one. Bob Moog didn't invent the instrument. He just made them more accessible. It was invented by Leon Therriman in 1920. The most famous theremin musician was a woman named Clara Rockmore. She was born in 1911 and was a classically trained violinist.

but had to give up the instrument because of an injury in her arm. So she started playing the theremin. When you watch videos of her playing, it looks like she's pulling invisible strings very gently. She said, you must not only hit a note, but you must hit the center of it. You cannot register any of your internal emotion at all. You cannot shake your head, for instance,

or sway back and forth on your feet. That would change your tone. Later, Clara Rockmore recorded a little bit of a little. an album called The Art of the Theramen with Bob Moog. And in his building of these pheromins synthesizers, he eventually starts building out his early modular synthesizers, which he shows off in New York City at the Audio Engineering Society AES conference, where he meets Wendy Carlos, and she becomes an instrumental part of the development of those early synthesizers.

Bob and Wendy exchanged numbers and became. friends. They started working together. Wendy said it was a perfect fit. He was a creative engineer who spoke music. I was a musician who spoke science. We'll be right back. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss. us ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you.

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That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. After Wendy Carlos met Bob Moog, Bob started building a synthesizer for Wendy. He delivered it to her studio apartment on the Upper West Side in his station wagon. Wendy was working as an engineer at a recording studio and sometimes wrote music for commercials.

She used the extra money to buy recording equipment and new modules from Bob. Bob remembered that every time he visited, she had a whole handful of ideas on how to improve his synthesizers. He credited Wendy for many of the new features in his 1967 models. She was a real bridge builder because she was a highly technically proficient person that could speak much of his language, though she did not get a degree in electrical engineering. She could repair these modules that he made. She could build tape machines.

so she was able to bridge his language into the world of music on top of being a composer, arranger, and a musician herself. In 1968, Wendy Carlos reviewed a new album of electronic music that had just come out called Silver Apples of the Moon. It was by Morton Sabotnik, and it had been a surprise success. Wendy wrote that the album was a poor performance of a very fine composition. She felt that the synthesizer, not a Moog, was the problem. She was working on her own album.

It was going to be pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach all played on a Moog. She'd become friends with a colleague at another recording studio named Rachel Elkind. Rachel told Wendy she disliked both classical and electronic music, and Wendy decided to try to change her mind. She made a recording of a Bach piece on the synthesizer, and Rachel said, I'd like to hear a whole album of that. And so Elkhine had a connection to Columbia Records who said, okay, maybe there's something here.

They were actually working on a sort of compendium of Bach recordings that they're like, well, this can fit into this sort of little Bach campaign that we're doing. There were a number of big Bach records that had come out in that era. In the 60s, the Swingle Singers had done some vocal versions of Bach. There was a Beatles album where Beatles melodies were turned into Bach-like compositions. Glenn Gould was famous for his renditions of Bach. And so there was a man for Bach. Bach was hot.

Wendy Carlo said at first, she got the sense that Columbia Records wanted to make a record deal with the synthesizer. She said, it was kind of insulting, applauding the tool, not the person who used. She also said, but many people did that for years, credit the instrument first. She started recording in the summer of 1967. It took her weeks to record each song. She had to painstakingly perform each individual line and then track back over herself, the next line, and then the next line, and then the next line with a multi-track recorder to make this final composition. For every note, she used several effects from the different synthesizers. She needed to plug and unplug cables in different configurations so that it didn't sound, quote, simple and mechanical.

For example, if you wanted to make a flute sound, you could take the muted tone of the triangle, and you could maybe add a little bit noise, and you could have it come in just a little bit slower. Somewhat flute-like. If you wanted sort of the rounded qualities of an oboe, I might use a square wave. maybe use a filter to make it not so buzzy. And you could just go all out crazy and mix and match and add lots of different sounds altogether. Bob Moog used whatever he had to make the machines work. His prototype used a doorbell button to trigger a filter. Early models of the Moog synthesizers

sometimes used a car ignition as the on switch. Wendy Carlos said that the Moog was the best that she could find at the time. But she hated that the notes sounded the same, no matter how hard or soft he pressed on the keys. It wasn't sensitive like a piano, and it was hard to keep in tune.

She recorded the entire Bach album in her studio apartment in her free time. So you listen and you think, well, I'm hearing Bach, but do you listen and think I'm hearing classical music? Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, there's something interesting about the fact that Bach was

the composer, because Bach himself would often leave the instrumentation of his compositions unspecified. In a famous piece of his, like, the Art of the Fug, he doesn't, there's four instruments, there's four voices, but he doesn't say this needs to be played on strings, on voice, on woodwinds, on piano. It's left to the discretion of the performer,

how they want to sound these melodies. So in a way, it makes him the perfect composer, centuries later to come along and say, well, why don't we try this with a synthesizer? In fact, I think that the synthesizer is really excellent at helping you hear all of these individual voices that were so important to the styling of music in the Baroque era. The melody was paramount. Our current concept of how harmony works, where you kind of think about, like, there's a chord and then a melody on top.

Bach wasn't thinking in that way. Bach was thinking about every single note is its own. own individual voice. And sometimes when you hear a broke composition recorded in a large concert hall, those voices can get blurred together via the reverb in the room. And there's beauty in that. But these recordings of the synthesizer, you can hear each individual voice, because they're recorded just from the synthesizer right onto tape. There's no room sound. You can really hear each voice independently and how they're each operating to create this larger whole. And that way, I hear it very much as a classical composition.

I don't necessarily think about it as electronic music. I think about it as a classical work that happens to be performed on a synthesizer. Wendy Carlos released on Bach in 1968. She was 28 years old. We asked Charlie to demonstrate what Bach sounds like for us on his own synthesizer. This is Bach's two-part invention in F major. In the world of classical music in 1968, this was like a time of a lot of upheaval generally. People were questioning a lot of the dictates of classical tradition and the concert hall.

Composers like Luciano Barrio were writing pieces that memorialized Martin Luther King Jr. who had been recently assassinated. Philip Glass and Steve Reich were taking their pieces out of symphony halls and performing them in art gallows. and downtown clubs. And so for Wendy and her collaborators to come along and say, hey, we're going to flip some of this Baroque masterpiece on its head, that was very much in line with the kind of disruption and experimentation that was happening across the board in the classical world at that point.

Switched-on Bach was a huge hit. It's been over a year on the Billboard charts, and it eventually sold over a million copies. The album won three Grammys in 1970. I think she had no idea that it was, no one had any idea that this album was going to be so successful. This was an album that every household needed to own. How was the album received by music critics? Very positively.

This was heard as a breakthrough, a breakthrough as a performance. Glenn Gould, who was famous for his renditions of Bach, praised the album. Letter Bernstein was so inspired by it that in his televised appearances, of music appreciation brought out a large Moog modular synthesizer and spoke about how the album Switched-on Bach had changed the way that people are experiencing music. And here it comes now. Hello, Hal. The thing about it that really interests us today is that this is the instrument on which

has been recorded a very popular album called Switched-on Bach, which I'm sure most of you have listened to. Through this record album, the Moog machine here has made a startling contribution to the new Bach rage. Switch on Bach really changed people's perspectives of what electronic music could be. This could be melodic. This could be harmonic. This could be in dialogue with the classics of European concert music. And that really opened the door for other artists to start using these electronic sounds.

some of the early adopters of these instruments were rock artists like Frank Zappa, jazz musicians and funk musicians like Herbie Hancock, composers like Suzanne Chani. And very quickly, what had been this technology confined to university basements was suddenly all over the airwaves and becoming. one of the most exciting new sounds of innovation in music. More and more synthesizer music came out in the 1970s. Mort Garson released an album of warm earth music for plants and the people that love them called Plantasia. To get it, you had to buy a plant from a specific store in Los Angeles

or a Simmons mattress from a Sears. It since developed a cult following. In the 1970s, Stevie Wonder started experiencing, experimenting with a new invention, Tonto, the original new timbrel orchestra. It was a giant synthesizer made up of equipment from several different companies, including Moog synthesizers. It was built by musician Malcolm Cecil. The pieces were housed in wooden cabinets that formed a 20-foot-wide semicircle around the keyboards.

One musician said using it felt like, quote, being inside an eyeball. Stevie Wonder wrote over a hundred songs using Tonto. One music writer said that this collaboration changed the perspectives of black pop music as much as the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper altered the concept of white rock. In 1982, Wendy wrote the music for the movie Tron with a synthesizer and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. A few years later, she recorded another album. She created an orchestra entirely out of the synthesizer. She called it the LSI Philharmonic, after the computer chips and the synthesizer she'd used.

In the 1980s, bands like the Human League and Depeche Mode were at the top of the charts in the UK. A record executive told the New York Times, it's getting really difficult to sell a band in Europe if it doesn't feature synthesizers. Critics of the synthesizer called the music it made soulless. The lead singer of the Smiths said he found nothing more repellent than the same. synthesizer. A music executive described the sound of synthesized drums as sounding like a raw egg on concrete. And the American Federation of Musicians estimated that jobs for musicians who played acoustic instruments had dropped by 35 percent between 1983 and 1986. One out-of-work

musician called the synthesizer a monster. But Wendy said that for her, the point of the synthesizer wasn't to replace real instruments. She said she wanted to build new sounds that have not been heard before, but are equally satisfying to the ear. We'll be right back. Attention, Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera, a fragrance intense with carathe gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, topi caramelized, and tonka-tosted. A combination that seduce from the first instant and leave a weyer.

Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discoveredla and let you move over for susentia. What was the first Wendy Carlos song

that you both heard? My first encounter with Wendy Carlos was through the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange.

And I remember hearing these interpretations of Beethoven and and other classical composers played on an analog synthesizer. I mean, that just like kind of imprinted on my brain in this powerful way. And I remember being sort of like haunted by those sounds. And I think I looked up who, you know, who made the score and who Wendy Carlos was.

And that was probably the first time that I really became aware of her. And then later I learned much, much more about everything else she accomplished. I think I was first aware of her in excavating my father-in-law's record collection. My family threw out the records before I was born because, you know, technology changes. And so the records were out and cassettes were in. And so we didn't have my dad's record collection. But my father-in-law has an enormous record collection. And I remember going through it, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago,

and seeing this album with Bach surrounded by the Moog synthesizer. What on earth is this? How influential is the synthesizer in music today? It's the most. It's everywhere. There are so many sounds that as a non-musician, you might not actually be able to identify because they're being made from a synthesizer. Oftentimes the world of popular music

is about pushing the boundary of the color of sound and made with a synthesizer. Whether you're listening to, frankly, country music uses synthesizers today, If you're listening, obviously, to electronic music, hip-hop, any kind of pop track, usually the bass is going to be made from a synthesizer. Many of the sounds imitating strings or the sort of quality of strings will be a synthesizer. All the bleeps and bloops and sweeps and sounds that we call it ear candy in a recording are synthesized.

So it's ubiquitous in popular music. It's also ubiquitous in film music. And I think Wendy Carlos' influence there is underappreciated. because if you watch a major motion picture today, largely we've moved away from the sounds of large orchestras making classical-like compositions. When you think of the great works of John Williams, Star Wars and Indiana Jones and all those great orchestras,

now if you watch a James Bond movie, action movie, really any movie, you're going to hear the sound of a synthesizer. You're not going to hear the sounds of the full string section nearly as much. She's really one of the first people that brings the synthesizer into the world of film scoring. And it's a bridge from those classical orchestrations, which she's literally rearranging for the synthesizer. So the synthesizer's just, it's everywhere. Since Switch John Bach came out, Wendy Carlos has released over a dozen albums.

In 1985, Bob Moog told People magazine, Nobody is in her league. By then, Wendy had moved to Greenwich Village, and it also started traveling around the world to take photos of eclipses as a hobby. In an interview, Wendy said that her ideas for music would sometimes come to her in her sleep, in dreams. And then when she would work on the idea,

she said it was like taking a piece of fruit and squeezing it through a sieve or something to get the pulp out of it, to get at the actual juice. Wendy and Bob kept in touch over the years as new developments to Bob's original synthesizer came out. And then, in 2005, Bob Moog died from a brain tumor. Wendy attended his funeral in North Carolina. She played a few pieces on a Moog synthesizer.

Later, she made a post in his memory on her website, with a pencil drawing that she made of him at the top. She wrote about how they first met when he was asleep next to a booth at the audio engineering society convention. She said, I don't know how. have been able to start my career if Bob had not been there, and I'll never forget him. Today, Wendy's music is only available if you can find a physical copy. When people put her music online, she intervenes to have it removed because of copyright infringement. She has a website that went up in 1996, but hasn't been updated very much since 2009. She calls it a living document. There are a lot of photos. You can see her eclipse photography.

and she's written a lot about her approach to composing. Over the years, she's built a keyboard that can tune all the keyboards in her studio at once, and she's built her own theremin. She said that for every parameter you can control, you must control. When many of us picture a synthesizer, we see lots of knobs and buttons,

and she wants people to push the boundaries of every knob. It must be performed. It must be utilized to make new sounds to explore timbers that are otherwise still yet undiscovered. She was often very critical of people's performance on the synthesizer because they didn't do enough to push the boundaries of what it could accomplish. She said in 2007, I'm satisfied with the way my career has progressed. It's a heady time to be around, and I hope I have many more years to continue doing this. We reached out to Wendy Carlos, but didn't hear back.

Special thanks to Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan. They host a podcast called Switched on Pop, where they break down pop songs. Is the name Switched on Pop a reference to Wendy? Yes, very much so. This is Love is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Silison, and Megan

Canaan. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Learn more about the show on our website. Thisislovepodcast.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at This Is Lovepodcast.com slash newsletter. You can listen to This Is Love without any ads by signing up for Criminal Plus. You'll also get to listen to ad free to our other shows, Criminal and Fiberica mystery. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes and more. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at This Is Love Show. This is Love is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and so is Nate and Charlie's podcast, switched on pop.

I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love. ...viourte your passion in a business with Shopify, and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard it? The best conversion of the world. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify facilitates on your site web, in the networks, and in the radio social, and in any place.

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