 Welcome to this British Library online event from wherever in the world you are joining us. I'm Colleen Cosmo Murphy, your host of this event that is part of the British Library's 2022 season of sound. This spring, the library will host a series of talks and performances celebrating the British Library's remarkable sound archive. One of the world's great audio collections, the archive includes over six million recordings from voice and oral history to nature and environmental sounds and of course music of every conceivable origin. The season of sound includes a full live show by one of today's panelists, Will Gregory, who will perform with his Mogue ensemble in the main British Library entrance hall on Saturday the 23rd of April. I will also host a number of classic album Sunday's events in collaboration with the British Library, each featuring live interviews and playbacks with special guests that include orchestral maneuvers in the dark. The legendary David Bowie producer Ken Scott in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and one of the pioneers of house music, DJ producer Louis Vega. For details on these and all season of sound events, please visit the British Library website. Over the next hour, we will take an in-depth look at the pioneering work of electronic composer Wendy Carlos. Her combined intellect, work ethic and creativity led her to great achievements which included her own inventions, her collaborations with the late synthesizer designer Robert Mogue, her indelible contributions to the scores of celebrated films and an album that held the top position on the classical charts for three years. I also want to make special mention that Carlos is a very private person and perhaps some of her fans may feel we should not host an event centered upon her work without her permission. The British Library did contact Carlos about this event, asking if she wanted to make a contribution but did not receive a reply either in support or opposition. As Carlos's music is a vital part of the development of both electronic music and the popular music of the 20th century, it is only fitting that an exploration of her work is included in the British Library archive. Joining me in this exploration is a panel of experts. Will Gregory is best known for his work as one half of the electronic music duo Goldfrapp, his scores for films, stage and television including the forthcoming thriller series, Chloe. And as previously mentioned, he will be performing some of Wendy Carlos's music with his Mog ensemble for the British Library season of sound. Jude Rogers is a broadcaster, documentary maker and an arts journalist for the Observer and the Guardian, for which she offered an article on her subject. She made music jump into 3D, Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius. Terry Tenlitz is an award-winning multimedia producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ, and owner of Cabotone's Recordings and is based in Japan. Her work combines a critical look at identity politics including gender and sexuality with an ongoing analysis of the socioeconomics of commercial media production. Adrienne Utley is best known as a member of the band Portishead, has played or recorded with Jeff Beck and Marianne Faithful and also composes scores for film and television including collaborating with Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp on the forthcoming series, Chloe. For further information on our panelists, please click the tab at the top of the screen. So let's start with a bit of historical context to Wendy Carlos, starting with her unique childhood in which she created her own inventions out of necessity. Jude, would you take us through Carlos's early years through to her work with Vladimir Usachevsky, her mentor at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center? Yeah, of course. So most people might think that such a pioneer had a incredibly wealthy or privileged background. It wasn't the case at all. Wendy was born into a working class family in Rhode Island, went to a very normal high school, and her parents were quite poor when she was very young. They loved music. They were both from immigrant backgrounds. Her mother was Polish and her dad had a mixed English-Portuguese background, which is where Carlos comes from. They met working at a movie theater, which is in Amanda Seaworth's biography, which is a nice detail, nice background to Wendy's story. A detail I've also got from that biog is how her parents couldn't afford her a piano when she was little, but she still had lessons. Her father drew her a keyboard on a piece of paper so she could practice between lessons. But there was this incredible work ethic within Wendy. Interestingly, her father became a textile business owner and eventually did quite well himself, so they raised themselves out of poverty in that way. But her work ethic is incredible, too. She built a high-fi system for her parents by cutting wood and soldering wire. I haven't got the age of it directly, but it's before 14. She won a science contest in school at 14 by inventing a computer. This is 1953. She made a tape machine for music making. She built a little bass on the studio in her house. She was really inspired by early film music. She was really inspired by film music of an electronic, the early electronic stuff that was coming out. She loved Baby Barron. She loved Pierre Henry. So there's all these inspirations coming in, but not privilege, which is interesting, I think. But she ended up going to Brown University and then Columbia University. So many people think that she was very privileged. Can you tell us a little bit about her work at Columbia University with the Columbia Princeton Electronic Center? I think what's most interesting about that is she worked on the RCA2 synthesizer, the first real kind of electronic synthesizer which involved punched paper. This is where it came in. So she worked with, as you said, Vladomir, Mrs. Chesky, who was behind this synthesizer. So this concentration on technical training and engineering was very important alongside the artistic. So that technical training fed into Wendy II, combined with her obvious musical background, which was shared by her wider family passion for music. Quite an unusual combination of, not an unusual combination of interests, but the proficiency being so high on both sides is quite unusual. Obviously they came together to form the person we have now. And obviously her talent is what got her into those universities. And she would work incredibly hard. She would do midnight shifts so she could work on the machines because that's when it was available. She would sleep in the day and work overnight. She would do anything she could to spend time. And obviously back then you would spend a lot of time to make anything out of these machines. Yes, the synthesizers in the 1960s were very different than the synthesizers that are produced and played today. So in order to really better understand Carlos's meaning of expression, Adrian, would you give us an idea of what the early synthesizers were like and the painstaking efforts Carlos had to undertake to create a sound on them? Massive subject, obviously. And there's, you know, different areas of, there's a West Coast, East Coast thing happening. And there was some, you know, the San Francisco Tape Center was were earlier than this. And like Yusiechevsky and people were using tape, like French, you know, Pierre-Henry and people were using tape and old test oscillators that they could find. It just made a sound or a filter that was used for testing in a laboratory. So it seems, I don't know exactly the chronology, but after she left Columbia thing with Yusiechevsky, all around that same time actually, a Bob Moog was building his synthesizers and they hooked up somehow, probably you know, Jude, more than I do that. But it was very, very rudimentary. So an oscillator is a thing that makes a sound and it makes various different types of shapes of sounds, sawtooth, square tooth, square wave, sorry, sine wave, etc. And they have very individual characteristics of sound. So, and then you use a filter to add, I can actually play you some if you want. Oh yeah, that'll be interesting. You could also look at Wendy's little description with her modular synthesizer on YouTube, which is brilliant at showing you all the different sounds and actually very simply showing you. So an oscillator, it just makes a sound like that. And they have different sounds. So that's a sawtooth, that's a square, and this is a pulse, a sine. So they've got very different characteristics. And then you put that through a filter. So if we take a sawtooth, we can cut that down. You'll recognize those sounds, you know, so she was working with that. But there was no such thing as an envelope, which is the thing that shapes the sound. I think it was Vladimir Yusevsky that came up with the idea that, you know, say a trumpet, it grows, its sound would grow like this, if you want it to, or it could be very. So you needed something to give this shape to the sound. So they came up with what's now called an envelope, attack, decay, sustain, release. And they are sort of put sections of the sound, which was actually massively epic thing. Otherwise, it's kind of just on, take your finger off. So, and I think that very early on, Wendy kind of had very rudimentary equipment. And so it was very, very difficult really to make, for instance, switched on Bach. Incredibly, Will and I talk about this loads. How do you make music that is so completely musical from something that just basically just goes, you know, where do you, how do you start just you, if you're in an ensemble of eight musicians, you know, violin, viola, cello, etc. You play together, you make music. This is what we do. We make music together. We're sitting on your own. I mean, it's easier now with the kind of technology. Most people could do this on their laptops with some of the programs that come with their laptops now. But in those days, you have this massive synthesizer that you have to patch all the sounds with wire. So you take an oscillator, you make it go into a mixer and you take another oscillator into into that mixer, you blend them together, you put them into a filter, etc. It had to be thought about a lot. And would you use a sawtooth for the string sound, or would you use a square wave for the string sound? What do you prefer? There's all these options open to you. And how do you start this massive Brandenburg piece? How do you, where's the tempo coming from? When it speeds up and slows down? How are you doing that? Well, I happen to know that just by some nefarious way of finding things out that used a click. So you can take one of the oscillators and make it just like this. Just use a click and put that on to tape and then that's your and you can change that the speed of that, which will give you your tempo if you want things to speed up and slow down. So it's that's we haven't even made any music yet. Now we've just got a click on a piece of tape. So I'm always really interested in this and I don't have the answer and I'm sure it would be hard to find out exactly how it really started. And also there's no chords either. There's nothing polyphonic. It's all monophonic, one line, which is like an orchestra, like a violin in that context. So it was a massive, long, long, long journey to make this incredibly incredibly beautiful music. And then to add in the taste of it, what sounds you might use, notes you might even add to Bach, because Will knows more about this, that baroque music had ornamentation that is almost like improvisation. So it's a very wide open thing of interpretation on many levels musically and tempo wise and its sonic aspect. So I mean, I think that's I don't know what that explains it to some extent. Sure, I think it does. I mean, we you're talking about, of course, switched on Bach, Carlos's debut album released in 1968, which was a surprise hit. And it really became the best selling classical album of its time. It also resided to the number one position on the classical charts for three years. It actually almost didn't even happen because Carlos originally wanted to release an album of her own compositions. But her collaborator, Rachel Elkin, convinced her to perform her own renditions of the baroque composer to help ease people into the sounds of the Moog as an instrument via music that was really familiar. You were saying that Will has a good idea of perhaps how Bach was an obvious choice to for this kind of Moog, these Moog renditions. Well, I would add, I think it was quite hip at that time to have Bach because we'd had Jack Lucier playing jazz interpretations of Bach and it was kind of, it was your hipster pad kind of music. And the Swinglesingers, of course. And the Swinglesingers, yeah. There was the Bach to Rock ad campaign that the record label was doing too. It was like a kind of, I had something to add at some point. Go ahead. Go ahead. I just want to say like maybe like what also made a lot of the kind of conceptualization of that kind of synth work possible was the fact that Ustachevsky and also Carlos were coming from histories of tape music and music concrete. And so with that kind of ongoing relationship to tape and layering sounds and these sorts of things, I think that would have made it much more intuitive and maybe kind of more easy to jump into a kind of compositional strategy with a monophonic synth that instead of just being presented with a synth as a block item and trying to figure out how to how to multiply it and stuff. So I think like that history of music concrete and tape music was also surely really important, even though there became a technical divide and kind of like also a school divide between those who focused on tape and you could say like field recordings and manipulation of samples and things versus the development into synthesis sound synthesis and in a way like Carlos herself moved away from the idea of sampling and so that when the digital samplers did come out, she kind of dismissed them as just kind of like a novelty thing in some interviews. I don't know what her real formal stance was, but like, but there seemed to be something that happened and that was kind of parallels development and the kind of split between people who were working in tape which and entering into sample culture versus the kind of delve into synthesis sound synthesis. Absolutely, I think that's true. I think I might not be wrong that somebody will know, was this possibly the first time that sort of conventional music had been played on an electronic instrument? Well, I think that became quite an issue, didn't it, because in fact I was listening to an interview with Glenn Goulds who was a very early supporter of, you know, Bach on synthesizers and in fact he said of the Brandenburg four that Wendy did that it was the best interpretation of Bach he'd ever heard. So it certainly got some plaudits from people who were, you know, I mean, Glenn Gould was somebody who played in the studio pretty much only at a certain point in his career and I think he felt a kindred spirit with the Wendy Carlos approach which is very much a studio based interpretation of the music and I think that that was a bit of a shock to the system of, you know, the conventional classical world because obviously that was very much a live performance, a collective performance, something that you did together with other people in an ensemble, certainly with the Brandenburg three that's a nine-part string piece and so it was, in a way, it was ideally suited, wasn't it, to what Wendy was doing with her mono synths because obviously it's nine individual lines and with Bach, you know, the sound of the lines, they're all equally important, you know, there's no top part, middle part, bottom part with Bach, you know, it's polyphony which means that every part is equal and every part from the bass to the, you know, the first violin interchange and speak to each other and I think the wonderful thing about that record is and why it's so suited to this approach was that Wendy Carlos was able to give all the lines their own specific sound and that's where the genius really for me comes in because suddenly the music, the composition of the music becomes even more three-dimensional than it would do in a conventional ensemble of strings which is in some sense homogeneous, you know, that it's sometimes hard to tell whether it's the viola playing or the second violin or, you know, it's all a bit of a conglomerate of sound and I think that when Wendy unpicks all the individual lines, suddenly you get this deeper perspective of what is happening compositionally, suddenly you see that the, you know, the various sounds are delineating the lines so much more clearly than you would get in a conventional performance. So I think that was the, you know, the breakthrough excitement of this approach to Bach and that piece and the other piece that I love on that album is the E flat prelude and fugue number seven which is just again Gould again picks this one out as being spectacular and it's a bit less of a, you know, a monumental tour de force than the Brandenburg three but it's just the choice of sound, you know, again this is this thing where and I think this links to Bach too because he was spectacularly interested in organs and they were like his synthesizer of the day, you know, they were, he would be tinkering around with various organ builders trying to, you know, develop the sounds of the various stops and what have you and that was something that I think if, you know, Bach had got his hand on a Moog synthesizer, he would have gone absolutely into orbit, you know, something that he was into the idea of technological revolution as well as Wendy. So I think that there were two minds there that were kind of beautifully sort of superimposed and I think that that album still stands up as being just a, you know, given the fact that it was done presumably in a bedroom with an eight track and a reverb unit and, you know, just all this ingenuity. I think it's one of the first times you get this kind of total studio kind of vision of music and I think that it so it was groundbreaking in so many ways. I think it was a shock as well to all the people that thought that electronic instruments weren't real instruments suddenly, you know, the territory that they had marked out, this is our space, you know, we don't we don't talk to electronics, that some weird kind of fake sort of synthetic version of music suddenly was like move over, you know, this album became what you say number number one in the classical charts for three years and it still resonates I think to this day. Well, I would say that the cultural struggle around that moment was had a very long precedent though and that we know that, you know, starting with constructivism and futurism and the sound experiments going on at the beginning of the 1900s, going into Leon Theramen, developing the Theramen for use in a conventional orchestra and these sorts of things that that debate over what qualified as music rather than noise and these sorts of things had already been going on for a long time and we can and I think that her album did, you know, bring that into pop culture in a way but I also know that for a lot of people, you know, like in my house that album of course we had the album too and, you know, but it was, you know, bought by my father who was like he was into chamber corral music and acoustic things and stuff. He would sing in chamber corrals and things but he it was one of those things where like I think a lot of people bought the album and never really listened to it as well, you know, because it was a kind of it did have a kind of kitsch aesthetic to it that made it something that was something you just kind of pick up, you know what I mean and I think that the types of people who were drawn to appreciate it are kind of, you know, if you forgive me for speaking for other people kind of weirdos like us and that would actually delve into the, you know, want to find it actually interesting to think about electronic music as something that was intention with traditional cultural definitions of what constitutes music and stuff like that. So but that precedent though had already been there, you know, with not only the theremin also the introduction of like the distortion pedal and country music which went on to define the through its kind of abuse to find the sounds of R&B and rock but it was actually originally like started out as a country music thing for to layer the string sounds for guitarists who were short of backup orchestra and they just wanted that to flesh out their sound and stuff. So there are these histories of like kind of concert what people traditionally consider conservative music, the theremin, Leon theremin working with orchestra this sort of thing and the country music giving birth, giving rise to technologies that through their abuses then led to a lot of other cultural innovations and I think maybe somehow Carlos's album is kind of at the crux of that technical innovation but also there's a there's definitely a conservative undercurrent too also just simply in the selection of classical music. I guess also that that's that kind of conservatism also is one of the reasons that it made it so wildly popular and ensured that it was number one on the top of the classical charts for three years and really popularized the sound of the Moog at that time so quickly as well. I think for a lot of people into experimental music though I would say that's also what makes it suspect in certain ways culturally. Well we'd have Stockhausen, haven't we? I mean Stockhausen was pioneering electronic music in Europe along with Boulez and a lot of other people you know later at Earcam but it's it's a niche isn't it? I mean you know Stockhausen in a way goes miles further than Wendy Carr's of course that is conservative by comparison and I think that you know where Stockhausen has been you know none of us have ever got to it I mean ever since I think he still remains you know the furthest out there in terms of electronic experimentation but I think that it's the kind of just hitting that cultural moment isn't it where and I think that's what Kubrick picked up on isn't it because he saw this as a kind of a contemporary vision of culture that he could then deploy in in his world which was possibly you know running along similar lines certainly you know after making 2001 but I take your point that yes I mean it is conservative isn't it? I mean the idea that you would and some of the most interesting electronic music is when it's just literally trying to make the electronic sound like itself it's not trying to make it sound like a string. I mean I think you know when she went on to do like the LSI Philharmonic Orchestra project development stuff in the 80s and stuff which was about kind of synthetically recreated you know the kind of typical 80s thing of when record production budgets were down and bands were you know the big bands like Chicago went from 11 members to four and these sorts of things that you know like the way that electronic music was meant to kind of fill in for an acoustic absence that you know her own the LSI project was also about developing synthesis techniques that were about making an electronic version a synthetic version that was you know indistinguishable from the acoustic and this sort of very kind of in that sense a very also conventional trajectory in terms of like a musicology a relationship between synthesis and musicology how it was kind of envisioned for her and as that project went on I thought. Now Jude some of these pieces she had to also extend as well the these these Bach pieces I believe there's one on the album that she had to actually extend. Well there's a cadence this is something that Will himself told me in the interview I did for the feature of The Guardian actually kind of turned this very short cadence into a improvisation and I think that's where the you know the real genius Wendy for me anyway comes in you know when you hear the composer in her you know she said that she thinks that she said that she thought the term switched on Bach was a re-orchestration and that tallies obviously with what Will has been saying but you know I see it as invention you know kind of maybe it's her you know humility about her kind of her own skills really. I wanted to add do you know about the conservatism you know I'm from a Welsh chapel going family maybe Terry we've got a kind of similar sort of conservative family background. Roman Catholic background yeah kind of for say you know same thing gods apparently. My grandma would disagree but okay cross my fingers but my my grandparents you know were kind of very conventional and you know very stripped unprotestantism no incest no excitement. After my grandma died I found a copy of switched on Bach in her collection of her small collection which was basically you know orchestral mantevani stuff like this. I've never had a chance to talk to her about it which made me sad but it's interesting what you're saying. I do think that it's maybe in the UK you know it just seems to be this record the lost people bought partly for a novelty aspect but I I do think that they gave the instrument give them a sort of authority it could have made it into this here is this thing that can do this stuff it can play this great conical composer and I've made a had a kind of shift effect in maybe public consciousness you know it possibly did you know because I guess electronic music in Britain before that was just seen as this stuff that makes scary sounds you know that's what it does and now here it was doing something very inventive with you know this canonical composer um you know you're moving on from that you know my introduction to Wendy was um a copper gorge as it would be for most people and just being absolutely pinned to my seat in this film club at university watching this band film on a dodgy video copy hearing Purcell and knowing the tune you know because I'd heard it before but not really knowing who it was when it was from and just being absolutely pinned to the spot you know the way that Wendy can invest this music with this sense of terror and atmosphere and I think that music would be invested with terror if it wasn't for you know Kubrick's imagery around it um you know her relationship with Kubrick is very interesting anyway um and uh you know they were both very tough cookies in the sense that they know what they wanted to do and they didn't want to be you know um pushed from their tracks with um you know what they wanted to do um but yeah it's interesting you know whether it was seen as a novelty and put in a cupboard and not you know I never heard my grandma play switched on but um but um you know then but from talking to other people with parents or grandparents I had it you know suddenly the mode became something that was recognizable and authoritative and you know maybe got seen as a little bit silly three or four years later when you know Emerson Lake and Palmer were on TV I don't know you know I'm a little bit young to remember that but kind of um I wonder if you give it that authority um with his age of you know still the age of sinisterness around the edges I think this is a good time to segue into actually her the the parts that she did contribute to Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange before we move on from from the uh Bach can I just ask one question because you held up the cover earlier yes how many of us grew up thinking that uh that the model on the cover of switched on was actually Wendy of course I think we all did yeah we all did like okay I thought it was actually Bach but that was pretty young you thought it was Bach it was very young well back to Clockwork Orange Jude can you tell us how her relationship with Stanley Kubrick came about well this is something that anyone can read on her amazing website which sadly has a great website yeah hasn't been updated in any great detail since the late 2000s um but um there's a brilliant entry there um after Kubrick has died actually um when she talks about their relationship um and um you know she says Stanley Kubrick was not an easy man to work for he was vastly interesting completely open about whole his secrets and had a dry sense of humor you were always stimulated working with him but it was seldom painless um obviously they work together in a Clockwork Orange um and that working relationship involved a couple of meetings but a lot of it was done remotely with you know sending parcels and phone calls and um this kind of thing and um you know that obviously was a success successful collaboration um Wendy also did music for The Shining which didn't um only a few pieces that we used in the end um most um obviously most famously but best known is there was a fantastic trailer for the film where a piece of Wendy's music was used which is still you know you can see it online this original trailer it is one of the most jolting trailers for a film ever you know I've seen that film a lot but it still makes me feel scared to watch it again or even think about it um I guess that um you know but I one thing I really like about Wendy's entry about him on this website is she's very keen to stress how we very easily put people into boxes you know we think of Stanley Kubrick as this wild crazy you know director but she says you know he was he was um quite gentle he loved animals you know if anybody's a cat lover here watching the entries about Wendy's loves of pets are wonderful um an amazing footage of um her cats climbing on her synthesizers in this little clip that she did in the late 80s that was used on BBC's horizon documentary um but um she says you know he wasn't a recluse he kind of met new people he had phone calls with friends and you know it's obvious that she's not like that as well I should say um the reclusive genius line in my piece was put on by the sub-editor you know I think you know Wendy as a person is a lot more complicated than the very easy you know boxes we tend to put her in on similar with Kubrick I do wonder from reading those entries of Kubrick if you saw a fellow soul you know somebody who was obsessive about detail um and took a lot of time to make sure things were right um but um you know they had a good you know working relationship a lot of the time um even though you know if you just look at the main details um you know they work together and then it didn't happen with the shining whatever but this tribute is on the site is very very fond um you know um it's amazing just thinking of you know how Purcell and Beethoven were reworked in a clock of orange you know I was completely you know stunned when I kind of first saw it and um you know you know I'm profoundly unsettled you know and I do find a lot of Wendy's music profoundly unsettling I know we'll come on to Sonic Seaslings I was just listening to that this morning driving into work in the car you know um with uh in the middle of the countryside with the weather kind of doing strange things I think god this music it is pushing our buttons and trying to not let us fall you know be comforted by music it's trying to challenge us all the time you know Switzerland Bark is trying to challenge us all the time as well I think even though it's a conservative project in some respects Adrienne do you think her contributions to the scores of a clockwork orange and the shining uh do you think the films would have had the same impact without her contributions no I don't I don't think so at all um I think I mean to go back on something we were just talking about it occurred to me that actually electronic music in popular culture has as often been as a film soundtrack going back to the theremin with the day the earth stood still and then on to Forbidden Planet with the concrete kind of Louis and B.B. Barron bringing this to the general public if you like it would be unusual for most people to be listening to Louis and B.B. Barron in their house on their high fight um so electronic music had a place in film most definitely over the year it was the place where we most certainly in England uh we would have heard the radiophonic workshop with Doctor Who and various other things and they would have been like an applied version of electronic music we wouldn't be listening to Stockhausen but we would have been listening to Doctor Delia Derbyshire um but it seems to me that um a croco-croco orange set very much in the future in this weird dystopian world it made uh with somebody who's into Beethoven uh this violent man who's disturbed guy who's into classical music somewhere in the future it makes complete sense to have used an electronic realization of those pieces of music to me and um compositions around that kind of feeling so for me it's it's completely essential and I mean like the opening titles of The Shining it completely sets this mood um this heavy vibe that um I don't know how else you would have got it really it's very foreboding will you're also a fan of her score for Tron can you tell us why you you feel it's so special well I think that again you've got some um obviously you know two lovers of technological innovation and I think it it can't be overemphasized how technically electronically sophisticated um Wendy Carlos is um in terms of you know being able to have this conversation you know with with Robert Mogue and also developing this synthesizer called The Synergy um and the whole idea of superimposing various um you know unlike a mood which Adrian was showing us earlier um you know there's ways of superimposing various tones which go towards emulating you know acoustic instruments or creating totally new sounds and I think that Wendy Carlos has been on the forefront of developing all these new ideas and so I think that um you know when they were trying to insert computer graphics into you know whatever they're doing in Tron and I'm still not sure how they did it um obviously that would have been grist of the mill for for Wendy Carlos you know something that's breaking the mold um and developing some technology um and I think that some of the sound design and it is is really impressive it's it's it's beautiful and I remember myself being impressed going into arcades after Tron came out and some of the games that they play you know throwing discourses around all the motorbikes um they had the best sound in the arcades because they you you go and sit you put your head between two speakers of the the video game and um you've got this amazing 3d sound which I'm sure Wendy Carlos would have had a hand in you know because she understood so well you know how to move sound around so I think that was important but I mean I echo this you know I think this beautiful relationship with with Kubrick I think that he was someone who was absolutely obsessed with cameras wasn't he and the detail of f-stops and trying to film in candlelight and all the other things that happened with Barry Lindon and um you know all the the cameras that he would hoard um I'm sure that if they if Wendy was into cameras they would have had you know hours of conversation about that kind of thing and they probably had hours of conversation about synthesizers because I think that Kubrick obviously had this very wide-ranging mind and so it just feels like this you know this obviously dysfunctional marriage and but it was a marriage no doubt wasn't it and I think that um as Adrian says this idea of uh reinterpreting because obviously Kubrick already set slightly in the future and we've got this distorted version of the of these classical pieces which perfectly mirrors um you know the taste that you get left with of something unsettling, familiar but somehow totally unfamiliar and I think that that that also comes into Tron and um although there's a lot of orchestral I think that Wendy got excited she was obviously offered an orchestra um so there was a lot of orchestral music in there too um and that must have been a bit of a liberation for a minute to leave the bedroom and get a full orchestra to play with. We've just touched upon it but I want to elaborate on it a little bit further for viewers who may not be aware that she obviously had a very great relationship with Robert Mogue as well as she did with Stanley Kubrick and she also kind of helped develop uh some of the technologies through feedback and hours and hours of conversation and letters. Jude can you maybe mention some of the things that she suggested to Robert Mogue? Well the thing that always amazes me is that she kept on him very early on very early on about having a touch sensitive keyboard for the Mogue and this was kind of um you know 64 65 it didn't become a feature of synthesizers until the late 70s um but uh you know she was and she was quite adamant this has to be done this has to be made um even though technology wasn't there so her ambition sonically was you know out there you know Terry might be somebody who could speak a little bit more to the functionality or kind of of that but um you know that always fascinates me that kind of because you know for people who don't know how to kind of patch things together and do things you know I am a musician from you know way back you know playing the violin playing piano I've never used a Mogue though I desperately want to and I've been to Will's studio many years ago and I wanted to fiddle with everything but I like the fact that Wendy wanted to have something that could be was accessible that people could have a relationship with wasn't too difficult um and you know the fact that she has kept um working with you know more accessible technologies through the years you know this wasn't just something that had to be used by a group of you know academics in a room that was not available to the people she wanted this to be available more widely and I think that's probably one of her most important um contributions to you know music in general you know that kind of um commitment to whiteness availability um to everybody you spoke earlier about sonic seasonings which I have to say I think is uh my favorite album by Wendy Carlos and the first one to solely feature her own compositions it came out in 1972 it's a double album each side takes up one each composition takes up one whole side and each one is based around one of the seasons of the year it's a mixture of electronic music experimentation and also field recordings which I believe were recorded by her then collaborator Rachel Elkint and it's also kind of known as a proto new age proto ambient album would you agree with that Jude? Oh yeah definitely you know there was you know we were getting to the early stages of you know the new age movement then and you know field recordings dolphin sounds you know this is all starting to happen around the early 70s that kind of interesting environment as well tied in with you know some books that were coming out and things like Silent Spring you know there's this idea of you know um you know the obviously the hippie movement and elements of hippie movement and environmentalism um but um with Wendy you know I think it's quite weird I'm in an office today with a picture behind me that's it's a bit like the cover of sonic seasonings it's quite weird that's Black Mountains in Wales um but um again on her site uh Wendy talks about the development of it you know how it's it's very lovely simple idea in some respects you know each of the it's full for contrasting movements each loosely based she says on images of the full basic seasons on our planet spring summer fall winter and she talks about being how her compositions are just sense of programmatic music so music is set in mood and that can suggest things um you know there's a lovely line at the end of um that this it's from the original liner notes for sonic seasonings we asked could you the listener supply one element that we could not possibly blend into the final mix your own imagination and his and his remembrance of nature's blessings I think that's interesting bringing the listener in um it's an extraordinary record and again it's not you know oh spring bird song you know and then sunshine there is bird song and it's it talks about how nature is not this comforter nature is something that is can be quite frightening it can be quite wild it can be random it can change on a you know spin of a dime you know it's um um so it it's ambient in a sense that it puts you in a place in a mood but it's not something you put on to you know in the background to soothe you while you're concentrating trying to concentrate on something you know there are records I go to for that I'm one of those people who will listen to Thursday afternoon by Brian Eno on repeat while I'm trying to finish a piece um this is not one of those records you cannot not be present for this record so it's yeah it's it's not quiet it's not Brian Eno's ambient where you know it's quiet music it isn't it's um elemental music um and yeah I think it's probably my favorite of her records because it just um creates this world it's great because it creates a landscape and it also echoes her interest in um you know the world you know um you mentioned um somebody mentioned her interest in you know if she was interested in cameras she'd have talked to Kubrick she was interested in cameras because she used to take amazing pictures of solar eclipses which are also documented on her website which I would encourage anyone to check out you know her her and Rachel Elkins went on these amazing trips throughout the 70s to find solar eclipses on top of all this I think she went to every single uh full solar eclipse between like 1972 to 1985 and photographed all of them and some of them even made their way onto covers or magazines like astronomy magazine and a lot of stuff as well her mind to imagination her um you know enthusiasm for the greatness of the natural world I think that's so you know inspiring as a word that is overused but it it absolutely is you know it's enlivening you know um and um you sense that kind of listening to this record there's an awe there but it's you know it's an awe with the sublimity of nature the proper sublimity in another way it could be terrifying in the same way as it could be beautiful I mean her intellectual capacity is astounding and we've spoken about her sense of invention the sheer work uh and drive to produce an album like switched on Bach having to make those sounds mean it would take hours sometimes to to create a single note we've spoken about her own composition but how about her as a sound innovator and somebody who really kind of challenged the musical forms that we work within and I'm thinking mainly about temperament I mean most music modern music that we know of and western popular music is in 12 tone equal temperament but she was very frustrated the contemporary musicians would always stick within this kind of a framework and always kind of using the same sounds Adrienne do you have something to say about this that's another huge subject isn't it and I think we all come up against it with um I think Will you would probably be able to talk about um it's I don't know where to start I think um the thing that attracts me going back to switch on Bach actually and and that is in equal temperament supposedly and so they're splitting voltage to be able to make an octave divided equally so that the notes but what really attracts me to that record and many other early electronic music in that context is that the tuning is very often not quite right and I have heard later interpretations of Bach on synthesizers that is really really not interesting at all in that it's its tuning is so absolutely spot on and not um not to me anyway very interesting and I think that Wendy must have come up against the fact that Bach and every single town I think had different tuning if you look at Baroque organs some of them have split keys so there's two keys so your C sharp would be you had two options of how it would be within whatever scale you're playing so apparently Mozart wrote something in F sharp major which on a mean temperament piano sounded really bad and he did it deliberately to make it sound this is what my friend has told me um so you couldn't play in every single key perfectly and so um tuning became standardised at some point in order to to make it possible to play in all keys um also it was set at A440 which is a it's it's gratuitous I think and I have worked in A430 or something what do you mean by A440, A430 for the viewers who aren't familiar with that? Yeah actually on a Moog synthesizer and I would add that the octaves are in feet lengths just going on for something Will was talking about earlier which is based on organ stops but Bob Moog also put on his mini Moog this which is a tuning thing and it's tuned to 440 hertz and it's note of A but that is completely gratuitous nobody there's no that is just set by I think it was set in France but it could be lower than that there is a whole theory about and I have played in a lower pitch than that where everybody tuned to a lower pitch and to me to my feeling it felt more more interesting more calm more something if you can read about this uh endlessly if you want to it's a it's a massive mathematical subject about the divisions of notes and Bach would definitely have been extremely involved in it and and I'm almost certain that Wendy would have well she would have been struggling with actually trying to on a Moog synthesizer as you go up the octaves on the switch it gets more and more and more out of tune so you have to retune all the time so that's one aspect of it and I do believe I don't know the record is it called beauty in the beast done in mean temperament I think which is a different type of more of a early baroque type tuning Will did you want to add to this well I mean you know my experience of tuning in synthesizers is that they go out of tune which is not deliberate and but it's also possibly why switched on Bach has that you know sort of slightly scrunchy vibe and yeah there's definitely bits in it where you can tell that she's recorded up to a certain point and then she's started again and carried on but maybe it was a warmer day so all the oscillators are a little bit sharper or I mean it's interesting isn't it that that synthesize purely electronic and acoustic instruments share this thing of being temperature dependent on their pitch you know until we get into the digital world when it all gets terribly boring and flattened out and there is something alive about these early synthesis and their agent you know we love that about them that they're that they are wayward that they they go off in you know spurious directions and surprise you and the next you know you set up a tuning and the next time you play it someone's opened the door and the temperatures drop to degree and they've gone off somewhere you know and when we do it live when we play Brandenburg 3 you know we we tune up before each piece and after the first time we do it the audience are very very amusing you know tuning up and after we've done it about the tenth time you know you can see the face is getting a bit longer but unless you do it you know they they go off and like some sort of they go overripe and it's rather wonderful and I think it's something that should be celebrated and you know up to a point and of course that as Adrian says you know you've got the infinite then possibility because they're electronic of having this mathematical choice you know you could put an octave or a whole range of a keyboard could be playing a semitone you know so you could have you know someone like Harry Partch who develops all these kind of 32 note scales would have really appreciated you know this ability of electronic instruments to open up the whole idea of tuning and you know explore all these subdivisions of pitch which are as Adrian says totally arbitrary I mean the 12th note scale okay it's based on Pythagoras but it you know it's it's within our grasp now to sort of tweak it and and send it in all kinds of different directions and so I think that that that is something I'm sure that Terry might have an opinion about as well well I I did have something but I lost it I was thinking Terry you were talking before that you felt that her you know she had a more conservative approach to to the actual act of composition but how about in the in the sense of scales in which she wanted to work how she would challenge other contemporary musicians to kind of get out of their comfort zone and use different temperament use different sounds yeah but like microtonal scales and these sorts of things are also very much a part of like the playground of academia and the way that I think more and and there was also a kind of um it was it was still kind of about formulations of rules in a way you know it wasn't about um for example like if we go back to the sonic seasonings album which for me is probably her most listenable album I would say but I also immediately start to identify it with other albums of the time like for especially what was going on in Germany with the kind of more hippie meditative aspects of krautrag like deuter or these sorts of things these sorts of producers although like the German the Germans were kind of more relating it down to like folk music I would say and in Carlos's case it still was very much about a kind it it's very much more compositional I would say and and that this kind of I find it interesting that this kind of in a way you could call it meditative music meditation music um despite the kind of moments of what what you might call destruction but in general it's like kind of meditation kind of album but it's still very much in opposition to repetition and trance and I think that in terms of like Carlos's ongoing it maybe it sets the stage for her antagonism against disco and the way that synthesizer would be used later um where like you know she's quoted in several places is talking about how like she you know if you if you said something 16 times then I then I understand it already and move on kind of thing you know like compositionally speaking so but you know we know also that you know from the underground perspective that this this idea of course what the repetition is actually about is not composition it's about trance and it's about a kind of um you know dance culture in that sense and I think that as a kind of underground producer myself and who also has worked a lot in ambient music due to its um political resonance with the culturally minor um in terms of like around in the 70s and I think was in 77 Giacotali had a book called noise and one of the kind of fundamental theses of the book was that um basically the logic of um basically like that the logic of musical orders reflects the cultural orders and that what is defined as noise and and not music uh is more relatable to the cultural periphery and what is excluded in culture so there was a kind of political undercurrent of the ambient movement as opposed to the kind of you know more american spiritual new age blah blah that there was this kind of you know in a way marxist you could even say um and uh roots to uh a kind of socially grounded form of ambient music that was interested in this notion of noise as a kind of symbolic um a symbol or metaphor audio construct that kind of invoked a position of the culturally minor and I think that in the way that Carlos approached that concept of like using special tunings in order to kind of subvert the harmonics of conventional musicology still for me from my perspective still functioned in the musical logical sense it was still about a kind of um tuning game and a kind of craftsmanship that was perhaps deployed in a way that was more about opening people's mind as to what could be music as opposed to for example in my case trying to um open people's minds to um the functions of noise or do you mean also like versus aesthetic versus intellectual kind of pursuit so it's not about being aesthetically pleasing for instance I I mean I think I I think in a way once you get into that kind of academic kind of microtonal composition and stuff it's the concept of pleasure is really kind of arbitrary and even in my own work you know pleasure is quite arbitrary and discomfort is hard but but you know like I mean it's really not about making things sound nice and I think that was that's also part of the point is to to get people to think about the real possibilities of sound uh as something that doesn't have to simply be positive in effect you know and that it can open up into these other tools and other feelings and invoking different forms of affect that might be uncomfortable that might be um unusual and that might you know make you question yeah is it noise or is it music but I think for her the the the the cultural vibe that I get without having ever spoken to her is that is that she's more likely to say yeah it's music it's all music as opposed to saying like yeah the 12 tone is also just noise you know like you could go either direction like this I don't I don't know maybe I'm just out of maybe I'm wrong but that's kind of the feeling I get I think you're right I feel I feel that I I feel that too yeah I don't know if I can enlarge on that but I'm just I'm very interested in that aspect of tuning and I was interested in what Morton Subotnick was doing earlier on in the San Francisco tape center and they're kind of they didn't even have a keyboard on their instruments so it wasn't really ever about pitch but there's some kind of intuitive feeling about tuning and I've in some of my most favorite music well stockhausen and radio funny workshop and david warhouse the the I'm not even sure that everyone was aware of what you've just said and I do know people who intellectually split an octave into 19 tones and it's harsh I definitely do not want to hear that kind of music it um in a you know it's more it's it's very intellectual and mathematical and there's a lot of talk about it and it's incredibly interesting I'm not very good at math so it doesn't interest me that but when you actually hear music quite often or when I actually hear music based on those kind of things it's it's a little it's a little into intellectual in some way um I don't know where I'm going with this but I it was kind of sparked by what you were saying really and the noise aspect of things I think is more in some way more intuitive and more um visceral so we heard about how wendy carlos has been an innovator technologically making her own inventions compositionally challenging other musicians to use different temperaments and different sounds do you feel that her work is really important to the narrative of electronic music and what place does she hold in the wider arena of 20th century popular music this is kind of our our wrap up do you want to start terry it's a big question I mean I I think I uh I say no because I'm not sure like how to I think for me the the thing that is most interesting about her work when I listen to it is the engineering aspect of it and I um in a way it's like um and this is going to really come across as harsh but like you know it's it's like I think that I think that it's it's really fair to credit her as a developer and engineer who actually composed with the devices that she worked on because a lot of audio engineers um like I have friends who work with uh corg and things out here in Japan that um you know a lot of developers do not actually produce music themselves or audio themselves they they engineer it and this is also and then they kind of come up with things that also this is why the kind of um you know if you ever played like a synths um uh uh what the default sample songs inside a synth and stuff they're they're disasters every time like I can't think of a single synthesizer that has a really enjoyable interesting uh demo song on it and um so I think that you know like for Carlos to uh have worked have bring all this kind of compositional training that she did to the kind of engineering side is really kind of I think what for me is the most interesting but I think also like kind of when we think about the history of electronic music and how it has progressed so much through abuses of technology and people not knowing what they're doing and um the idea of products being developed for one market that then fails and then falling into the hands on the used market cheaply into people who don't know what they're doing and then those abuses kind of became the impetus I mean that happened with R&B and and rock and it happened of course with uh acid house and the 303 and all these sorts of techno yeah so it's like uh you know this idea of from my perspective as a producer I think the most cultural advancements are the ones that happen by accident and so I that's kind of why I value her engineering side more than the kind of compositional side but um others may may disagree of course but oh I think I'm I'm there with you as well you know I think that touch sensitive keyboard vision is very important I think um the imagination um that she has and you're allowed you know how does it affect on everything that went from there you know um as we were talking earlier on about um you know clock orange and the shining you know so much of the atmospheres of that film especially clock of orange of course um about what she contributed to them um and it's about the idea that you should keep pushing um pushing the limits of what a piece of technology can do you know the fact that she started on a machine that was the size of a room and you had to operate with punched paper and you know the last thing we know about her you know I interviewed Laurie Spiegel for my um piece for The Guardian um you know I emailed and called lots of people and she was the only people that um that responded I wanted the only um you know synthesized pioneer herself you know an electronic pioneer herself who who did that and she said that she you know all she could reveal is that she'd been working with technology companies she'd been working with Apple you know and I'd be fascinated to know of course behind the scenes you know when he does not want us to know and that's absolutely fine but um you get the sense that in that there's that commitment to pushing things doing things in new ways and um you know that's the spirit behind some of the best electronic music we have still you know it's a maybe a bland thing to say but I think as an innovator you know she set the parameters yeah push those parameters yeah I'm I'm I'm interested in the fact that onwards what people would have heard from switched on Bach like Paul McCartney and George Harrison would have ended up buying because they had the money to buy this thing with these modular mokes because they were huge and really expensive and there weren't many of them uh to get one I think they sent theirs back and actually I think that some of those early mokes went on to different people the Rolling Stones had one um you can see it in performance in the film that went on to be owned by Tangerine Dream which who use it in a very different way and made incredible music onwards from there but I remember listening to Abbey Road as a kid and I didn't really know what that what this stuff stuff was within and I still reference those sounds today I still make those sounds today they're very simple now to do on old modular mokes stuff or mini mokes but they're really in my in my DNA I think and I think it started with Wendy using this in a more accessible way with switched on Bach and a whole plethora of people would have heard those instruments that that record and wanted to do this with their instruments and then there was obviously lots of records that jumped on the bandwagon of Moog like the electric cow goes Moog and which were not that what they're totally not interesting to me other than from massive kitsch value but the the include you know these these synthesizers especially with the beat fills for me were huge not have done made those sounds those atmospheres without them and I could talk for hours about that but we can't forget also Issa Tomita doing snowflakes are dancing about three four years after I think switched on Bach and and also if you think about survive you were talking about this juice survive the the band that scored Stranger Things series yeah big fans of Wendy's work big fans are not just in a kind of hey guys this is really cool you know I interviewed them as well for the Guardian article and you know they had you know they were interested in the equipment that was used at the time the patches that we used you know the nuts and bolts and to kind of revive that the spirit of music as well as you know of course there's some nostalgia in there as well of course there is but you know I thought it was very interesting that they said they picked up Wendy's records in the early 2000s you know every kind of second hand record chop in the west coast seemed to have these copies of Wendy Carlos and this was the you know early age of you know really crape digging online and also bands like Rage Your Head a put Rage Your Head a put up Kid A there was a kind of some quite big artists were kind of pushing you know this interest in you know doing purely electronic things who you wouldn't have possibly expected before so it was pushing you know these young teenage you know proto hipsters to find these records and seek out these new sounds and go back obviously you know there's a fetishization of the synth as well you know it looks amazing it looks great in a postcard a poster this kind of thing and we have to be wary of that as well because you know as everyone else in this panel is actually making music on a mug is much more difficult but it's interesting they when I interviewed them they were really geeking out in intense detail about you know the process and the nuts and bolts and you know there's a world around them that is interested in that too and you know I love the musical Stranger Things I think it kind of rings because of the sub hauntings of that music to a new generation to you know kids who are going to seek those things out you know the video game side of Wendy's output as well is interesting I'd you know I'd love to know more about that something I don't know about but you know that's going to have a connection possibly with the younger generations too well it's great to see that Carlos's music is still being is still influencing contemporary musicians will do you think the development of electronic music would have been the same without Carlos's contributions no I don't think it would I think we've already heard that Carlos and Moog had this collaboration and I think you know Moog was one of the few synthesizer designers who was listening at that time to musicians because I think a lot of the synthesizers that arrived on the scene at that point were fundamentally difficult to play you couldn't like Adrian said you know some of them didn't have keyboards attached to them certainly with stockhouse and it was just knobs dials and tape and so I think that that playability the performance side of a making a synthesizer we have to give a huge you know debt of thanks to Wendy you know from otherwise we wouldn't have had the mini Moog I don't think when we did and I think that switched on Bach started a conversation which hadn't been going on I think before that there was a niche idea of what electronic music was but in the popular you know cultural vision of electronic music there was a void I don't think it was a discussion and I think when that record came out everybody suddenly realized what you know wow we've got to this point where we can be this expressive and this exciting and this kind of detailed and this musical with an electronic piece of kit and I think that that that moment was a yeah it was a huge kind of what's the word you know the whole seismic shift in how everybody felt about electronic music and I think that also and maybe about Bach actually too because I think that suddenly there was another layer of depth that you could see through that that gave everybody you know this kind of beautiful vision of what polyphony was actually don't for me every other record that came out that was reproducing classical music electronically was less interesting I don't think I really I never I mean you know obviously people love to meet her and I think it's beautifully done but it's the marriage for me of monophonic synthesizer and polyphony that is the major you know attraction and the genius about that record and I still think it's the best iteration of classical music performed electronically so this day I think I think the only album for me that that that tops it is came I think it was in 96 it was Kurt Dukas switched on Wagner and really yeah and it was on the mil plateau label and he was a label made of mine and it and it plays into this monophonic aspect very beautifully and and so other yeah that's the only other album I can think of in that uvra that really yeah kind of excites me thanks for the tip I'm going to check that out yeah Kurt Dukas, C-U-C-A, C-U-R-D-D-U-C-A well thank you all so much this has been such an enlightening conversation and I think we have proven the point that Wendy Carlos's music and sonic innovations and technological innovations change the course of help change the course of popular music in the 20th century and certainly change the course of electronic music I want to thank our special guests will Gregory, Jude Rogers, Terry Tenlitz and Adrienne Utley and of course the staff at the British Library and of course we give much gratitude to Wendy Carlos and her pioneering work I'm Colleen Cosmo Murphy and I hope to see you all at one of our in-person events for the British Library's season of sound this spring thanks for listening