Walter Carlos

Switched-on Bach was a giant hit, one of the only classical albums in history to go platinum, and it spawned a brief (and often humorous) raft of imitators, who eagerly fired up the synthesizer and switched on, plugged in, turned on, or otherwise electrified some vein of music with varying degrees of success (I even have a dusty old album of transmogrified Scott Joplin rags, which doesn’t really work at all). Carlos himself mined the territory for a few more albums of transcribed classical pieces, culminating in his 1975 By Request album, which is a combination of some of his early experimental electronic pieces created while studying under Vladimir Ussachevsky at the famed Princeton Electronic Music center (first of its kind on the US), and odd realizations of a bewildering variety of source material – from Bach to Bacharach. It’s a schizophrenic album, bouncing around madly from high culture to low and back again, and ends with the startling Pompous Circumstances, an extended electronic meditation on Edward Elgar’s graduation warhorse as refracted through the prism of many different styles and composers.

The fact that By Request is such a schizophrenic album may be related to the personal life of its creator. Walter Carlos was in the unenviable and unimaginably difficult position of being trapped in a body of the wrong gender. Although a man on the outside, he was convinced that he was really a woman. The schism this created was so difficult and painful that it nearly killed him, and he resorted to that most drastic of corrective surgeries, the sex-change operation. Walter disappeared from the limelight, stopped recording, and was reborn as Wendy Carlos, the person she always felt she was meant to be. Four years later, she released her first album under her new name, a two-disc set of electronic interpretations of what many consider to be Bach’s greatest work, the Brandenburg Concertos.

After the warm critical reaction, she returned to recording again full-time, scoring a couple of Stanley Kubrick films (Clockwork Orange and The Shining) and working on painstakingly (and, if you ask me, pointlessly) recreating the subtle and complex timbres of an orchestra in a purely digital medium. Her grand thesis of synthetic orchestration – Digital Moonscapes – is virtually indistinguishable from an actual orchestra. I played it once for my stepfather Frank, a doctor of music and clarinet virtuoso, and he agreed – it sounded just like a real orchestra…playing bad music.

Carlos’ sex change is a mysterious subject. A giant pink elephant in the living room, everybody knows about it but nobody says anything. Look up reviews or go shopping for music and there’s no mention of Walter whatsoever. Perhaps that’s as it should be – the personal details of a composer’s life remaining personal and entirely irrelevant to the music he or she creates. Perhaps since Carlos always felt herself to be a woman, it’s perfectly appropriate to refer to her as “her” in all phases of her life. Biographical sketches mention that she studied at Brown and Columbia before her success with Switched-on Bach, but not that she was a he at that point. But if you look up old lists, Walter is who hit the charts in 1968, not Wendy. It’s all quite confusing.

I recently went to her website to try to find out some more information about this personal crisis and when and how she dealt with it. I wasn’t there to gawk or ridicule, I just wanted some more information. After poking around a bit, I found a section “On Prurient Matters” that looked promising. In it, Carlos rants for eight pages about how cruel and stupid and bigoted and hateful people can be – which I certainly don’t doubt – without ever once mentioning why people were being so cruel and stupid and bigoted and hateful. I can understand her frustration at some people’s fixation on her admittedly unusual biological and psychological situation and her fear that her life’s work will be overshadowed by narrow-minded knee-jerk prejudices, but you have to already know what she’s talking about to know what she’s talking about. Other sources are equally murky. In poking around on line, I came across a brief biographical profile that stated she had her “sexual reassignment surgery” in 1972 and that that was the last year that she released an album under Walter’s name and that the first album released under Wendy’s name was 1982’s soundtrack to Tron. But I have a copy of the original pressing of 1975’s By Request and it clearly says it’s by Walter, while the original version of the complete Brandenburgs was issued in 1979 and is just as clearly credited to Wendy. It’s all quite mysterious.

When the first Switched-On Bach albums hit the market, Carlos and longtime co-producer Rachel Elkind included survey postcards asking buyers what they thought of the music and what they’d like to hear synthesized in the future. Because the painstaking process needed to bring these pieces to fruition precluded any possibility of live performance, the postcards were a way to try to get some audience feedback. By Request was, as the title suggests, an attempt to satisfy some of those requests. So, there are a couple of character dances from The Nutcracker and versions of Eleanor Rigby and What’s New Pussycat nestled up next to respectful interpretations of Bach and not so respectful interpretations of Wagner’s wedding march from Lohengrin. But the centerpiece of the album is the remarkable Pompous Circumstances. Carlos uses Elgar’s theme as the basis for a remarkably inventive series of variations. And not just variations, but variations designed to sound like another composer’s work or, in some cases (such as the William Tell variation) like a specific piece. It is a wondrously strange piece, complex and humorous, and shows off Carlos’ training in music theory and composition as well as her virtuosic synthesizer technique. It is a style of writing variations on a theme that isn’t done very often because it is so murderously difficult. In fact, the only comparable piece that really comes to mind is mad musical genius Tom Lehrer’s fantasia on Clementine, in which he dresses the miner forty-niner up in the clothes of Cole Porter, Mozart, and Gilbert & Sullivan, among others. There’s also, come to think of it, a wonderful outtake from XTC’s studio sessions for Nonsuch that includes Andy Partridge riffing on his song That Wave in the style of the Smiths, the Cure, and Bob Dylan, which is included in his mail-order only Fuzzy Warbles set of effluvia. And I suppose you could sort of count PDQ Bach’s Eine Kleine Nicht Musik, in which Peter Schickle weaves existing pieces both sublime and ridiculous through Mozart’s best-known composition, but that’s not quite the same thing. Carlos sends the venerable Elgar theme through a musical funhouse of styles, bouncing madly between Bach and Scott Joplin and Sousa and Stephen Foster and Scottish bagpipes. It is an exhilarating exercise and a truly remarkable piece of music.

And if you live in England, you’ll never get to hear it.

Apparently, Carlos’ label, Columbia, let the estate of Edward Elgar know about Pompous Circumstances just before the original release of the album. The Elgarites flew into a panic, feeling that it was a disrespectful treatment of their master’s theme, and threatened legal action if it was released. Which then sent the Carlos camp into a panic (very much like what happened to William Orbit and his set of ambient dub variations of classical music pieces 25 years later). Eventually, they reached a compromise, allowing the album to be released as intended everywhere but England, where they lopped off the offending piece and sloppily appended a couple of previously released Carlos pieces. Which is why the recent CD reissue of By Request (something I thought I’d never live to see) proudly bears the sticker “Banned in Britain” on the cover.

I found my original vinyl copy of By Request used in Spokane one summer, while visiting my father. I had fairly recently waded into the murky waters of musical appreciation and was slowly and unsurely building up my meager collection (to give you a sense of how unfocused (or, perhaps, catholic (not Catholic)) my tastes were at that time, I also picked up a used copy of AC/DC’s If You Want Blood live album on the same shopping trip). I was 13, and teetering precariously on the knife-edge of adolescence. My dad had lived in Spokane for a couple of years and was doing what he always did – blowing into a new town, making a lot of noise and friends before sabotaging those relationships and disappearing into the night and starting it all over again somewhere else.

Growing up, my absent father was my hero, largely because he wasn’t there. I’d see him once or maybe twice a year, and those were always special, cherished times, when he’d lavish attention on me. I yearned for those times when I was a kid, and he could seemingly do no wrong. But that was all starting to change as I got older. I was starting to see cracks in his façade, and starting noticing the destructive patterns he repeated, and the way he kept everybody – even, ultimately, me – at arm’s length. My own loss of innocence (psychologically, if not physically) in matters sexual was giving me a new context in which to see the world, and I was beginning to see evidence of his confused and desperately hidden sexuality. On this trip, he decided that we weren’t father and son, but brothers, which I initially took as a compliment but later came to see as a cop-out. He didn’t want to be my father – didn’t want the responsibility – and his attraction to strong and supple young men was clouding our relationship. The physicality which had always been part of our relationship started to get strained, and his wrestling got a little too intense and violent for me, culminating in the night he playfully threw a couch on me and nearly broke my arm. For the first time, I could see the fear behind his blustery bravura and charm. It is always a difficult moment when a young man realizes his father is all too human, no better than any other random man, and that summer knocked him cleanly off the pedestal I had put him on with his blessing. For the first time, I could see the shadow of mortality in his eyes. I put on a happy face during the daytime, but I lay awake at night, trying to push the fears out of my head, confused about my new ambivalence towards him, hoping the visit would soon be over and wondering how long it would take to walk to Seattle and the relative safety of my grandmother’s house. It was the beginning of the end.