Wendy Carlos

The whole album [...] is one of the most astonishing achievements of this generation's music industry, and certainly one of the great feats in the history of keyboard performance

(Glenn Gould)

A composed, middle-aged figure, decked out in eighteenth-century garb (complete with the requisite white, curly wig), stands alone in a heavily furnished room. In some versions he's standing, haughty, in others seated and, one might say, astonished. The only immediately legible text on the cover suggests the figure is the composer of composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, presumably captured in his music room. But one cumbersome detail makes the image plainly anachronistic: between the musician and the walls sits a squat black three-door cabinet, a stubby monolith studded with sockets and sliders. From it springs a tangle of electrical cables, snaking across the floor of the room or running toward the only object clearly identifiable as a musical instrument: a row of black and white keys resembling a spinet or a virginal.

When “Switched-On Bach” hit record shops in October 1968, only a handful of people could have identified the bulky contraption on its cover as a synthesizer. Partly because the device pictured was the first of its kind: a Moog Synthesizer 3P, the portable version (loosely speaking) of the only commercially available electronic synthesizer at the time, developed by New Yorker Robert Arthur Moog starting in 1964.

These weren't the first recordings of synthesized sounds. In fields such as avant-garde composition, easy listening and pop, the novelty had already been circulating for a few years. Between 1967 and 1968, the Moog had turned up on records by major artists such as the Doors (“Strange Days”), the Monkees (“Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones, Ltd”), the Rolling Stones (“Their Satanic Majesties Request”), the Byrds (“The Notorious Byrd Brothers”), and Simon & Garfunkel (“Bookends”). Also in 1967, Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley (who in 1969 would go on to compose the synth hit “Popcorn”) worked the instrument into the space-age pop of “Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Electronic Pop Music From Way Out”.

But the use of the Moog on “Switched-On Bach” was something else entirely: not thorny avant-garde experimentation, nor some “decorative” touch dropped into an otherwise adventurous pop-rock sound. And it wasn't - or rather, wasn't only - the tongue-in-cheek gimmickry so fashionable at the time in countless novelty records built around the wacky possibilities of the latest technological toys.

On this point too, the lengthy text on the cover left little room for doubt: the LP's grooves held “Virtuoso electronic performances” of some of Bach's most celebrated compositions. In other words, this was a classical album - baroque, to be precise - designed to let the foundational masterpieces of the canon shine through the playing of a performer of considerable technical and expressive skill.

But which performer? On that front, the artwork was decidedly more coy. The only real clue was the line “Trans-Electronic Music Production Inc. presents:”. No hint whatsoever as to who, or what, that company actually was. To find out the names of the musicians involved, listeners had to turn to the liner notes, written by two of the three members of the team - co-keyboardist Benjamin Folkman and producer Rachel Elkind - with an additional contribution from Robert Moog himself.

For a long time, “Switched-On Bach” has been remembered as the record that thrust the synthesizer into the global musical spotlight, ushering in the age of popular electronic music through the singular genius of Wendy Carlos. The blurring of genre boundaries and the reluctance to appear on the cover have often been explained by pointing to the musician's transgender identity (she would not come out publicly until the late Seventies) and by downplaying her collaborators' contributions. While these readings are understandable, and backed up by the legendary status the album and Carlos herself would go on to acquire in the culture at large - not just musically - in the years that followed, they risk feeding an overly personalized view of the record, of its role and of what made it unique. Rather than being the product of one genius's lightning-bolt inspiration, “Switched-On Bach” was the result of painstaking teamwork, and the musical shift it triggered had less to do with the mere novelty of the undertaking than with the astonishing expressive completeness of the work itself - still evident today, and surely dazzling at the time.

The dream machine

“Switched-On Bach” [...] was one of the most electrifying albums I've ever heard. When I first heard it [...] it excited me so much I couldn't even explain it. It was so intricate, and so clear at the same time!

(Brian Wilson)

The Moog modular synthesizer was an ambivalent instrument: wonderfully convenient and maddeningly frustrating at once. Unlike the instruments being built in the same years by California's Don Buchla, which were geared toward avant-garde expression, the Moog had an interface anyone familiar with the piano could grasp right away: thanks to its sixty-one-key chromatic keyboard, playing short melodies was child's play. On longer pieces, though, problems surfaced: the electronic oscillators at the machine's beating heart were simply incapable of holding a pitch. The components were sensitive to temperature, and as they gradually heated up during a performance, the frequency of the electrical signal generated would rise, causing every note to noticeably drift sharp.

Worse still, the instrument was - like every synthesizer of the era - monophonic. It could only produce one note at a time. No chords, no doubled or tripled voices. In short: no Bach. Working around this limitation required overdubbing, and in the age of magnetic tape that meant spending hours making millimetre-precise cuts and splices on delicate strips of plastic tape. It was fiddly, hands-on work that fell within the skill set of only a handful of recording engineers and avant-garde composers - but it happened to be one of Carlos's strengths, since she had been dabbling in musique concrète since the age of seventeen and had always nurtured a strong interest in technical and scientific subjects (she earned a physics major from Brown University in 1962).

Then there was the matter of timbre. What truly sets a synthesizer apart from any other kind of electronic keyboard is the freedom it offers over the “colour” of the sound. Rather than offering a narrow menu of preset voices, the ability to configure and patch together the instrument's various modules however one likes opens up a virtually limitless landscape of synthetic sounds. But at the time - and for many years afterward, right up until the Prophet-5 in 1977 - there was no way to save a given configuration: switching from one timbre to another inevitably meant a fiddly tangle of knob-turning and cable-patching.

“Switched-On Bach” pushed synthesizer music to a level of performative complexity that, until the very day of its release, even experts would have written off as unrealistic. But that alone wasn't what stunned audiences and musicians alike, setting off the “Moog Craze” well beyond the modest scale it had kept to until then and establishing the synthesizer as the symbol of an now-total musical fusion of past and future. What made “Switched-On Bach” special was the sheer naturalness of its sound, the breadth of expressive horizons it revealed for the instrument - right there for the taking, and still largely unexplored - and the intoxicating sense that this new electronic reading of Bach wasn't just one of many possible interpretations of that music, but its ultimate destiny: as though the alien, layered sound distilled in 1968 in the silicon alembics of Trans-Electronic Music Productions were the very sound for which the composer's scores had been conceived, over two centuries earlier.

Approaching the giant

Bach is often seen as one of the most mathematical of composers. The traits that seem to feed this image of his music are (a) his famous use of a new tuning scheme for [...] 'The Well-Tempered Clavier', and (b) his mastery of baroque counterpoint, a technique involving the independent movement of numerous voices, all bound together by a shared harmony and an entire arsenal of compositional rules with a distinctly mathematical cast

(Nikita Braguinski)

Musicologist and technology historian Nikita Braguinski illustrates this effectively in his very recent "Mathematical Music – From Antiquity To Music AI" (Routledge, 2022): listeners in the late Sixties tended not to grasp the technical difficulties behind a work like "Switched-On Bach". They missed the contrast between the perceived "mathematical purity" of the music and the sheer physicality of the endless cable re-patching (and sometimes even the hammer blows) needed to bring it to life.

And that was a good thing, because even a rough sense of the days required to produce the initial "Sinfonia To Cantata No. 29" (the dozens of overdubs, the jungle of patch cables to untangle in order to pin down the subtle timbral shifts from note to note) would probably have put off many future keyboard heroes from their providential urge to emulate it.

Instead, the labor behind producing that logical, communicative sound remained an essentially private reality. The enveloping warmth of the non-winds (and non-strings) on the immortal "Air On The G String" gives no hint of the hours the Carlos-Elkind duo spent fine-tuning every sonic event, creating the illusion of multiple coherent instrumental lines embracing one another. Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's monumental "Analog Days – The Invention And Impact Of The Moog Synthesizer" (Harvard University Press, 2002) gracefully explores the creative relationship between Carlos and Elkind, highlighting how the two approaches complemented each other: Carlos visionary and perfectionist, the producer more pragmatic and ready to "seize the moment". The twenty-nine-year-old Rachel Elkind's jazz background and her ear for overall sound, honed through experience in musical theater, gave the pair the perspective needed to resolve doubts and impasses: while Carlos tended to enrich unconvincing passages with new layers and knob tweaks, Elkind would suggest paring the constructions down, so the music could sound brighter and more alive. Carlos was extremely skilled at conjuring new timbres, but it was often Elkind who sensed which colors could best bring out one note sequence or another.

It was Elkind, after all, who recognized the specific potential of Bach's music for the kind of reworkings Carlos was pursuing. The first rearrangements played for the (then still hypothetical) producer were actually pop tunes, like the theme from "What's New, Pussycat?" written by Burt Bacharach. They left her unimpressed. When, however, it came time for the "Two-Part Invention in F Major" (the future track three of "Switched-On Bach"), the feeling changed radically: "I felt that this was something really expressive, that could transcend the limitations of the instrument", she would later explain to Pinch and Trocco for "Analog Days".

Then again, Bach had already been successfully covered the previous year by Procol Harum with "A Whiter Shade Of Pale", and that same year the Beatles had tucked a fragment of that very Invention in F Major into the coda of "All You Need Is Love". More broadly, the composer seemed to be striking a chord with a new pop-loving generation: Janell R. Duxbury's compendium "Rockin' The Classics And Classicizin' The Rock" (Greenwood, 1985) lists eleven pop songs built around reworked Bach themes released between 1965 and 1967. A figure that is surely a considerable underestimate, and one bound to keep growing in the years immediately following, as a direct effect of "Switched-On Bach".

Further validating the choice of Bach are the liner notes by musicologist Benjamin Folkman, a co-performer on the album: "Many Baroque traits, such as crisp, bright sonorities, terraced dynamics, and the strong prominence given to individual voices, are among the most idiomatic features of electronic music". Folkman, a personal friend of Carlos and a Baroque specialist, oversaw the album's arrangements, ensuring that the performance style and ornamentation matched period practice. Elkind knew the album would be subjected to particularly harsh scrutiny by classical music connoisseurs, and she was greatly reassured by Folkman's involvement in the project: his name was, even to the most demanding critics, a guarantee of legitimacy.

Folkman's contribution proved essential to the realization of elaborate pieces such as the two excerpts from "The Well-Tempered Clavier" (Preludes and Fugues No. 7 and No. 2), which close side one and open side two. Coming after two other brief "inventions" (in B-flat minor and D minor) and the celebrated "Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring", these longer compositions feature three-voice developments and tempo shifts that allow for a thorough exploration of the synthetic palette devised by Trans-Electronic Music Productions. The pointed timbres of the first fugue, and even more so the jagged sounds of the second prelude, are among the boldest creations on the record: it's easy to let the imagination run and, putting yourself in the shoes of a listener of the time, picture how passages like these must have seemed like gateways to entirely new technological and musical dimensions.

Such timbral plasticity, however, went beyond the limits of an off-the-shelf Moog synthesizer. Even before embarking on the "Switched-On Bach" project, Carlos had struck up a friendship with sound engineer Bob Schwartz. The two designed and installed a home studio at Carlos's residence, where they assembled a heavily "custom" Moog, its modules tailored with the support of Robert Moog himself.

Among the modifications made specifically for Carlos was a slider to engage "portamento" (a smooth glide from one pitch to another), which would later become standard on most subsequent synthesizers. Or the pioneering use of velocity and aftertouch sensors, which wouldn't make their commercial debut until many years later.

Even so, it still wasn't enough. Carlos drew on every technique available, proper and improper alike, to boost the machine's flexibility. Moog would later state: "She used techniques that had been around for years – but better than anyone else" ("Playboy", May 1979). The most astonishing was probably assigning part of the keyboard not to controlling the oscillator's frequency (the notes, in other words), but to altering the parameters of the other modules. With the right hand she could play the melody, while the left hand plastically shaped its timbre or intensity.

Even so, the calm, majestic flow of the chorale from the cantata "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" must still have been quite an undertaking. However much the custom modules and various tricks could improve the effectiveness of real-time performance, the instrument's monophonic nature meant each key had to be released before the next could be triggered. A necessary procedure – especially in slow passages – so that every note got its proper "attack", rather than sounding like a shapeless continuation of the one before. But it was also a cumbersome way of playing, one that created an unavoidable distance and required every finger movement to be rationally calculated, demanding countless trials and retakes before the result felt expressively convincing.

"Switched-On Bach" is a masterpiece in the etymological sense of the word. It's a work conceived to display hard-won mastery, like the final apprenticeship pieces of medieval craftsmen. And the reworking of the Third Brandenburg Concerto that closes the LP is the masterpiece within the masterpiece. The second movement, in particular, exploits a quirk of Bach's score to turn itself into a whirlwind of technological invention. The composer's manuscript, for the "Adagio" at the concerto's center, gives just a single bar made up of two chords: a Phrygian half cadence (from iv6 to V) that was probably meant as an invitation for the harpsichordist to improvise. Carlos and Folkman seized the opportunity to craft a showcase piece, a survey of the synthesizer's science-fiction possibilities.

Dropping the largely conservative approach used for the rest of the record, the second movement shifts from "adagio" to "andante" and opens with a sound utterly unimaginable both in Bach's era and in the much more recent age of electric pop. The filter sweep that rips through the first second is a gesture familiar today to any electronic producer, and in a single note it reveals the entire gulf between an ordinary musical instrument and the ultimate instrument, the synthesizer. With a simple twist of a knob, the low-pass filter that dampens or boosts the harmonics generated by the oscillator moves from its most restrictive setting (letting through only the fundamental, for a clean but dark sound) to its most open (allowing all the bright, piercing upper frequencies through), sliding continuously through every shade in between. It's an opening, a tear that marks the dawn of a new era, an era in which the most intimate aspect of an instrument – its timbre – can not only be altered, but fluidly reinvented from one instant to the next.

The "Andante" crowns the symbolic marriage between Bach and the scientific-technological soul of the "Switched-On Bach" project, and packs into barely three minutes a preview of possibilities that electronic artists – from Emerson, Lake & Palmer to Drexciya, via Jean-Michael Jarre – would go on to explore over the following decades: the synthetic grandeur of "Brain Salad Surgery", the atmospheric potential later mined by new age and ambient music, the glacial sounds of techno, and the gurgling, luminous textures of glitch indietronica.

Worlds igniting

CBS had no idea what they had on their hands with 'Switched-On Bach'. When it came out, they lumped it into a press launch party alongside Terry Riley's 'In C' and a dreadful record called 'Rock And Other Four Letter Words' [...] 'Rock And Other Four Letter Words' sold a few thousand copies. 'In C' sold a few tens of thousands. 'Switched-On Bach' has sold more than a million, and keeps on selling

(Robert Moog)

Recorded in Carlos's home studio in New York, using an eight-track recorder the musician built herself, "Switched-On Bach" became a massive success. It reached No. 10 on the American charts, stayed in the Top 200 for fifty-nine weeks, and sat consistently at the top of the Billboard Classical Albums Chart between 1969 and 1972.

For Carlos, it was the start of a long career, made up of further classical reworkings ("The Well-Tempered Synthesizer", "Switched-on Bach II", "Switched-On Brandenburgs", "Switched-On Bach 2000"), major film collaborations ("A Clockwork Orange", "Shining", "Tron") and fascinating research-driven works, such as the 1972 double album "Sonic Seasonings" - an inspiration for much of the ambient and new age music to come - and the superb "Beauty In The Beast" from 1986, a compendium of a personal musical universe that, two decades after her debut, had come to embrace additive and FM synthesis, microtonality, and the rhythmic architectures of Bulgarian music and Indonesian gamelan. Her artistic partnership with Rachel Elkind would lead to the co-composition of the score for "Shining", and would last until 1980, when Elkind moved to France.

The impact on the record industry was seismic. In the short term, it triggered a flood of releases inspired by Carlos and co., mostly clumsy imitations whose awkwardness shows even in their titles: "Switched-On Rock", "Switched-On Country", "Switched On Beatles", "Switched-On Bacharach" and "More Switched On Bacharach", and even "Switched On Santa" and "Switched On Naples" (the latter credited to Piero Umiliani and his oscillators!). There are also some genuinely well-crafted re-creations: think of Gershon Kingsley's "Music To Moog By" and "Switched On Gershwin" (the former features the future hit "Pop Corn"), the various keyboard explorations of Dick Hyman and, later, the grandiose synthetic architectures of Japan's Isao Tomita. But only rarely do these works display the imaginative power of "Switched-On Bach", and almost never do they match its technical quality.

It's hard to overstate the influence it had on the progressive music that was taking its first steps in those very years (and, by extension, on synth-pop, new wave, new age, video game music, IDM and so on). The classical crossover phenomenon, which pushed pop songs to draw on classical references, was already well underway, but "Switched-On Bach" made a crucial contribution in bringing young rock audiences closer to classical music and, to a lesser extent, in sparking interest in electronics among those already familiar with the classical repertoire. Above all, it created the perception that new expressive worlds could emerge from the union of intricate compositional forms and new technological possibilities - Apollonian horizons to be explored with both reason and emotion, sometimes, though not necessarily, in connection with the "Dionysian" side represented by psychedelic experiences.

Today, more than fifty years after the record's release, these historical connections seem faded, almost taken for granted: electronic music simply sounds like electronic music, it's part of the landscape. The synthesizer has lost much of its revolutionary character. And indeed, the reasons to fall for "Switched-On Bach" no longer lie in its historical merits. Rather, they lie in its ability to transcend eras. In revealing itself, once the novelty has worn off, once the somewhat garish fad for classical reworkings has faded, and once even the record's legendary reputation has cooled a little, as the vital, dreamlike work it has always been. Today, perhaps more than ever, we're in the perfect position to lose ourselves in the grooves of "Switched-On Bach", to let it lead us through the maze of its voices, and to experience its uniqueness with unguarded fullness.

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16/04/2023