Marrington Wendy Carlos

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78952-086-6
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Wendy Carlos is one of the most influential electronic musicians of the 20th century, whose groundbreaking LP, Switched-On Bach, was pivotal in elevating the Moog synthesizer to iconic status. Her highly evocative score for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange redefined the sound of electronic music for a generation of popular musicians in the US and Europe. Best known for her adventurous sonic re-imaginings of the music of classical composers, Carlos was also an accomplished composer in her own right, whose original work on albums such as Sonic Seasonings and Beauty In The Beast deserves equal recognition for their progressive compositional innovations and sound design techniques.
With the aim of addressing this imbalance, this book offers a detailed track-by-track survey of all of her album releases from Switched-On Bach to Tales of Heaven And Hell, placing each recording in context in relation to musical influences, technology and thematic concepts, as well as providing analytical pointers to help navigate her classically influenced musical aesthetic. To provide a fully rounded picture the last section of the book considers a number of Carlos's miscellaneous one-off projects and evaluates the remastered editions of her earlier LPs released on the East Side Digital label during the early 2000s.

Mark Marrington is a musician, teacher and writer based in the North of England, UK. He has a wide range of musical interests including the classical guitar (about which he has written an award-winning book), quirky electronic music (some of which has appeared on BBC radio and the Dr Demento Show) and heavy metal, on which he has written several articles for academic books and journals. He is currently an Associate Professor in Music Production at York St. John University in the UK, where he gives classes on the history of record production and the techniques of electronic music composition.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marrington, Mark

Leseproben

Chapter 2

Switched-On Bach (1968)

Personnel:

Wendy Carlos: Moog synthesizer, performance, arranging and engineering

Rachel Elkind: producer

Benjamin Folkman: musical adviser

Record label: Columbia Records

MS 7194 Format: LP (stereo and mono versions)

Recorded at West End Avenue, New York

Release date: October 1968

Highest chart position: US: 1 (Billboard Classical LPs), 10 (Billboard 200)

Running time: 39:45

Switched-On Bach is among the most successful classical music recordings of all time and one of the very few in the classical genre to sell more than a million copies during the initial period of its release (the album was certified gold in the US in August 1969 and continued to chart for another five years, achieving platinum status in 1974). It remains the defining work of Carlos’s career, making her a household name and a seminal influence on countless composers and performers who had come of age in the 1960s, including Giorgio Moroder, Stevie Wonder and Rick Wakeman. A decade on and the album’s influence was still being felt in the work of synthesizer aficionados, including British synth-pop pioneers of the 1980s who held Carlos up as an icon of musical futurism, a reputation clinched by her seminal work on the soundtrack for the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.

On the surface, the LP appears to be little more than a collection of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) favourites, including ‘Air On A G String’, ‘Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring’, ‘Wachet Auf’ and the popular Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, which would not seem out of place on a typical bargain-bin ‘best of Bach’ compilation disk. What made the album so distinctive, surprising and even shocking at the time, however, was not the music (great though it is), but rather its electronic realisation and presentation. The key ingredient here was the Moog synthesizer, which Carlos employed in a highly imaginative and exploratory manner to re-invent Bach’s orchestrations. In doing so, she evolved a palette of tone colours unique to the new technology, which have since remained inextricably associated with the synthesizer aesthetic. A second important factor was Carlos’s approach to recording the album, using multitrack techniques, a commonplace in the popular music sphere but one which flew in the face of classical music norms. This arose from the constraints of the Moog, a monophonic rather than polyphonic instrument (that is, it only allowed for the performance of a single melodic line, no chords), requiring Carlos to record Bach’s pieces ‘additively’ one layer (or even one note) at a time, painstakingly assembling each musical thread in isolation on her eight-track Ampex, a process which occupied many months. She also mixed the music down in a way that did not necessarily reflect a traditional acoustic setting, resulting in an in-your-face sound which was worlds away from the ‘natural balance’ of high-fidelity classical recordings of the period. It was this quality that no doubt prompted the critic Hubert Howe (in Perspectives Of New Music) to describe the album as ‘a dazzling, slick, plastic-coated Madison Avenue commercial product’. With Switched-On Bach, we are, therefore, in the territory of a classical music recording that could never have resulted from a live performance at all, whether in terms of its sonic characteristics or its physical execution.

Switched-On Bach was also prescient in another way in that it foreshadowed the significant changes in the structure of the music industry that were going to come about as a result of increasing technological democratisation. Carlos created the album in her own private studio on West End Avenue in New York using a multi-track tape machine, which she had constructed herself using Ampex components. An independent set-up like this had few parallels at the time (the producer Joe Meek and the inventor- musician Les Paul are among the more well-known pioneers of what is today known as the ‘DIY’ producer type) and effectively pre-empted the era of what Brian Eno was later to refer to as the ‘studio as a compositional tool’. The most important consequence of Carlos’s independence from the commercial studio environment was that she was able to take the necessary time to develop her vision for re-imagining Bach’s music on the synthesizer, something which would not have been feasible had she been subject to studio schedules and expenses. The project also foreshadowed a new model of the producer-artist relationship, which focused on collaboration rather than top-down hierarchical dictation. Carlos worked closely on the album with friend and producer Rachel Elkind, who had steered the project towards Bach’s music in the first place, recognising its potential as a vehicle for a new synthesizer aesthetic.

Switched-On Bach was widely discussed and debated at the time of its release, much of the commentary being focused on whether the LP qualified as a ‘classical’ music recording. On the one hand, the fact that the LP received three Grammys in 1969 – Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance and Best Engineered Classical Recording – suggested that Carlos’s achievement was to be taken seriously in these terms, a position which was also reflected in the remarks of some classical musicians. For example, Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould, who had ironically abandoned a concert career to pursue the ideal recorded performance in the studio, pronounced Switched-On Bach, in Saturday Night magazine, December 1968, to be ‘the record of the year (no, let’s go all the way – the decade)!’ For some purists, however, Carlos’s radical use of the new technological medium placed the recording at a certain distance from the performance traditions of classical music, eliciting some irate responses. Charles Fager, in a review in The Christian Century, December 1969, commented that ‘None of the performances on the album sounds better – or even as good as –solid instrumental versions of the same pieces’, comparing playing Bach on the synthesizer to ‘building a Baroque cathedral out of styrofoam’. Donal Henahan’s otherwise more positive New York Times review in November 1968 expressed concern that the music’s technical difficulties were being overcome by machines, thereby removing the aesthetic pleasure derived from witnessing human virtuosity in action (he thus failed to appreciate how much performance there actually was on the album).

Perhaps most surprisingly, Switched-On Bach was regarded with suspicion by electronic musicians, who felt that re-imagining classical masterpieces on the synthesizer was an inappropriate use of the new technology. Harold C. Schonberg’s comment, in his 1969 New York Times review of the album, that what ‘composers of electronic music should be doing is creating their own kind of music’ encapsulates the majority verdict here, with critic David Ernst even going so far as to suggest that the album didn’t qualify as electronic music at all. These were perhaps not unfounded reservations when considering that the initial response to Switched-On Bach’s immense success was a plethora of imitations, in which almost all forms of music, from nursery rhymes to contemporary pop hits, were touched by the hand of Moog (among the more successful efforts were Gershon Kingsley’s Music To Moog By and Gyl Trythall’s Country Moog: Switched-On Nashville). In these terms, Switched-On Bach was a retrogressive step which debased the synthesizer and associated it with ‘non-serious’ easy-listening music. Having said that, it was the ivory tower mentality of the electronic music community that had, up until now, prevented the sounds of the synthesizer from reaching beyond a small group of aficionados in the first place. As Gene Lees wrote in his lengthy feature review for High Fidelity magazine in December 1968, ‘Carlos … has already made a considerable contribution, perhaps the major one to date, to the popularisation of the synthesizer as a legitimate musical instrument rather than a laboratory toy for specialists or a bloop-bleep maker for science-fiction movies’.

While these various concerns reflected the uneasiness of the musical establishment at the implications of Carlos’s recording for the future of musical performance and composition, it is important to remember that Switched-On Bach was also an album that managed to enter the Billboard 200 Pop chart and climb as high as the top ten. In other words, the recording appeared to have just as much relevance to the popular music audience, a consumer group well-accustomed to technologically mediated musical novelty and generally more accepting of genre-bending experimentation. Ultimately, Carlos’s decision to use Bach’s music was an innovative and elegant means of bridging the divide between the two camps and the album was pivotal in introducing the synthesizer to the ears of the mainstream public in a way which connected it firmly to recognisable notions of music. Carlos also succeeded in reinventing Bach for a younger generation, reaffirming his greatness in a new technologically modernised setting, which, like many past ‘transcriptions’ of the composer’s work, offered a new way of hearing...