Roshanak Kheshti - Wendy Carloss Switched-On Bach

SWITCHED-ON BACH

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Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler

The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner

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The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier

Blue Moves by Matthew Restall

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Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley

Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery

Tapestry by Loren Glass

The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau

Avalon by Simon Morrison

Rio by Annie Zaleski

Vs. by Clint Brownlee

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Switched-On Bach

Roshanak Kheshti

Contents

I am grateful to Ally-Jane Grossan for encouraging me to submit the proposal to 33 1/3, to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld for getting behind the project and to Michelle Chen for editorial diligence. Heartfelt thanks go to Kalindi Vora, who offered feedback on all things STS and to Amy Cimini who has been an invaluable resource on all things JSB as well as on the musicological significance of a figure like Carlos. Thanks to Michelle Habell-Palln, Sonnet Retman, Jade Power-Sotomayor, and Maureen Mahon for workshopping parts of the book with me. Thanks to Sara Mameni for substantive feedback and moral support on content and images, to Susan Stryker, Eric Stanley, and Christina Hanhardt for feedback on historical details around gay and trans politics in the era of S-oB , and to Sara Cassetti for supporting my Moog habit. Thanks also to Tom Erbe and the UC San Diego Music Department for access to their Moog 900.

Track Listing

Side one

1.Sinfonia to Cantata No. 293:20

2.Air on a G String2:27

3.Two-Part Invention in F Major0:40

4.Two-Part Invention in B-Flat Major1:30

5.Two-Part Invention in D Minor0:55

6.Jesu, Joy of Mans Desiring2:56

7.Prelude and Fugue No. 7 in E-Flat Major (from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier)7:07

Side two

1.Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C Minor (from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier)2:43

2.Chorale Prelude Wachet Auf3:37

3.Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major: First Movement6:35

4.Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major: Second Movement2:50

5.Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major: Third Movement5:05

Wendy Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in November 1939two months after the beginning of the Second World War. During the early years of the Cold War, she wrote her first composition. In 1962 Carlos graduated from Brown with a dual degree in music and physics, and in 1965 she earned her masters degree in music composition at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. By 1968, with the release of her groundbreaking electronic album Switched-on Bach , Carlos had tamed a postwar, antisocial, and paranoid spy technology (what would eventually become the vocoder and the Moog synthesizer) and given it a social life. With her unique background in both the sciences and musicology, she trained the prelinguistic grunts of tones pushed through filters to speak to masses. Switched-on Bach (hereafter endearingly referred to as S-oB ) brought science to the end user in a way that is not prefabricated and presetthat is dynamic and interactive.

S-oB forged the sounds that have now become standard in modern electronic music and engendered a curiosity about the analog world through the synthesizer. The analog synthesizer is hardly an intuitive instrumentrequiring was its master. Analog synthesizers are almost impossible to keep in tune and are unpredictable in live performance settings, giving them a strange autonomy and making them notoriously difficult to tame. Unlike the majority of other musical instruments, designed to function in sacred worship or ritual ceremony, the synthesizer was born as a result of happy accidents that arose in the development of war machines. They are instruments that cant be mastered, because there is no master religious or ritual narrative on which they are based. The analog synthesizer is a wild electric animal, the sci-fi creature no one saw coming.

As I will discuss in the following pages, Carloss interpretation of Bachs greatest hits was only possible thanks to Bob Moogs willingness to design a spec model to suit her needs and the experiments that Carlos and engineer/producer Rachel Elkind were performing on multitrack magnetic tape. S-oB is a product of tireless experiments with studio design, multitrack recording, and analog synthesis; it is a signature of Carloss well-known obsessive attention to detail and her painstaking interpretation of symphonic sounds through orchestration. A whole lot of technical, unglamorous tedium somehow managed to result in a record that became a requisite item in not only the most discerning record collections but also the more mediocre ones. It was a sign of the timesthis record becoming a means to imagining other worlds at a moment in history when the fate of the current one was dubious. A part of its appeal was the album cover, which prominently featured a modular Moog synthesizer set in contrast to a more traditional backdropornate wooden furniture, a Persian rug, and a figure evoking Johann Sebastian Bach himself, in full Baroque attire. This instrument, which some interpreted to be a computer, was clearly something fantastic, and likewise inspired fantasies in its listeners. From its debut as the sound defining S-oB to its current mass popularity among synthesizer aficionados and electronic music fans, the analog synthesizer made these sounds of fantasy. Whether in sci-fi soundtracks or space pop, its sounds transported listeners to another world; Carloss recordings translated these otherworldly sounds into music.