SOUNDTRACK: A Clockwork Orange soundtrack (1972).
I’ve had the CD of this soundtrack since the mid 1990s. I recall playing it all the time. I hadn’t listened to it in a while and it all came back as I listened again.
This CD is a collection of classical pieces, a few odds and ends and a number of pieces by Wendy Carlos.
I don’t intend to review the classical pieces which are familiar and sound great. But the Wendy Carlos pieces deserve mention.
“Title Music from A Clockwork Orange” (2:21) (From Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary). It is fascinating to realize that most of the carlos pieces on this soundtrack are actually classical compositions that she has arranged for the Moog (I assume she is playing the Moog on these). This piece starts with swirling sounds which turn into a fast melody with drums that are probably low synth notes. There’s a sprinkling of very odd sounds thrown in the mix which really give everything an unearthly feel.
“The Thieving Magpie (Abridged)” (5:57) [Rossini-Rome Opera House Orchestra]
“Theme from A Clockwork Orange (Beethoviana)” (1:44) In the movie, the main character loves Beethoven. So there are a number of pieces from Beethoven that Carlos has arranged here. This one sounds amazing in this gentle piece with that otherworldly synthesizer music and of staccato notes and chords.
“Ninth Symphony, Second Movement (Abridged)” [Beethoven-Berlin Philharmonic] (3:48)
“March from A Clockwork Orange (Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement, Abridged)” [Beethoven] (7:00) This is the most striking song on the disc with the synthesized “voices” singing the melody on top of a complex synthesizer pattern. After two minutes it slows and changes styles dramatically becoming more of a march with whistles and chimes and again those haunting voices. The end of the piece has a full choir of the haunting voices which sounds even more amazing. I’m so curious how she did this. Are there actual voices that she recorded and manipulated or are they generated from notes and manipulated to sound like voices? It says articulations by Rachel Elkind [now Rachel Elkind-Tourre], so I guess she sang and was manipulated?
“William Tell Overture (Abridged)” (1:17) [Rossini] This piece opens with the familiar horns but as this incredibly fast paced track moves along you can hear the synth notes especially in the quieter middle part. I wonder if those horns were real?
“Pomp and Circumstance March No. I” (4:28) [Elgar]
“Pomp and Circumstance March No. IV” (Abridged) (1:33) [Elgar]
“Timesteps (Excerpt)” (4:13) This is the only fully original piece on the soundtrack. It sounds like nothing else. It is a gorgeous spooky composition of tinkling sounds, low gonglike sounds and celestial voices. It grows somewhat menacing with lots of fast unique sounds skittering around a low throbbing bass. She adds in sounds that seems sped up (which makes no sense really), but they do. At one pint the two melodies seem to run counterpoint–low notes going in one direction, high notes in the other.
“Overture to the Sun” (rerecorded instrumental from Sound of Sunforest, 1969) (1:40). I have always loved this middle-ages sounding song, but I had no idea where it came from. Turns out it is by the band Sunforest and comes from their only album Sound of Sunforest, 1969. They were an English psychedelic folk group. You can play some of the album on YouTube (which sounds a lot like Jefferson Airplane).
“I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper” (rerecorded song from Sound of Sunforest, 1969) (1:00). This song is also on the Sunforest album, although it sounds very different here. I’ve always assumed this was some kind of fifties song and had no idea that this is probably the only place most people know it from. It’s a shame this album is so hard to find.
“William Tell Overture (Abridged)” (2:58) [Rossini-Rome Opera House Orchestra]
“Suicide Scherzo (Ninth Symphony, Second Movement, Abridged)” (3:07) [Beethoven] The perfect use of Carlos’ bouncy synths sounds. It’s amazing to hear her layering sounds as the song gets very big and seems to get away from her into an almost chaotic conclusion.
“Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement (Abridged)” (1:34) [Beethoven-Berlin Philharmonic]
“Singin’ in the Rain” (2:36) [Gene Kelly]. This is a cute ending and seems to tie in to “Lighthouse Keeper” even though it clearly doesn’t.
This is a really fun soundtrack. It is too bad that Carlos’s music is unavailable anywhere because it is really quite eye-opening even fifty years later.
[READ: October 15, 2020] “The Well-Tempered Synthesizer”
This article is a book review of Wendy Carlos: A Biography by Amanda Sewell.
I don’t plan to read the book, but I found the summary to be quite interesting.
I’ve known of Wendy Carlos for many years, primarily from her work on A Clockwork Orange soundtrack. I remember initially seeing that the music was recorded by Walter and/or Wendy Carlos and assuming that they were siblings or spouses. It was certainly a confusing listing and once that, it turns out, was rather offensive to her.
So I know a little bit about her personal story, but this review added a lot of details to her life that I didn’t know.
Most importantly is that none of her music is available online pretty much anywhere. Even when people post it, it is taken down quickly.
But more interestingly is the history of electronic music that Wendy Carlos was a part of. Like the opening line
Electronic music existed in the United States before the majority of Americans had access to electricity.
It is older than hip hop, of course, but also older than do-wop, bluegrass and big band jazz!
In 1906, Mark Twain heard a performance of a telharmonium which was like an organ that was connected to all kinds of gears and such. It was made by Thaddeus Cahill who created it to produce “scientifically perfect music capable of reproducing any sound produced by any musical instrument and many more that no musical instrument produces.” Twain was so moved by it that he said eh wanted to live longer so he could listen to it again and again.
In 1955 RCA produced its electric synthesizer. It invoked curiosity and dread and was described as grotesquely inhuman.
Then in 1968 Wendy Carlos released Switched on Bach and nothing was the same. Switched on Bach is often thought of as a novelty record, but when it was released, nothing had ever approached its level of sophistication and the reviews were gushing. (Glenn Gould called it the album of the decade.)
These were Bach pieces played by Carlos on a Moog synthesizer.
Carlos herself is something of a recluse. She is eighty, has not performed in years and declines most interviews. Her albums have vanished and are not available streaming anywhere. Even the author of this biography (the first one written about Carlos) was rebuffed:
Not one person in any of Carlos’s past or present personal or professional circles agreed to speak on the record about her for this project.
There is some biography detail though. She was born in 1939, and started playing piano at 6. But she had to practice on a drawn keyboard since they could not afford a piano).
She was very interested in electronics and built a hifi system from scratch at fourteen. She also built a computer and set up a decent recording studio in the basement (that’s in the 1950’s!).
Carlos was a miserable teenager. In part because she was designated male at birth and given the name Walter. She suffered from gender dysphoria which obviously made everything harder for her. She was beaten up and mocked. And the disrespect continues to this day–even though she was a pioneer in speaking publicly about this.
After college she decided to study the combination of music and physics, and she met exactly the right people to help her with her quest. She worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center where RCA developed a half million dollar synthesizer monstrosity that filled a room and was called the Mark II aka “Victor”. This machine could read four inches of music a second and record it onto shellac. It was painstaking to use and could produce about a minute of music a day. Carlos found it clumsy, but she worked hard with it.
Then she met Robert Moog. He had been selling mail-order theremins. Then he pioneered the modular synth with the keyboard being a voltage source. Carlos helped to hone and refine this synth.
Switched on Bach made a strange kind of sense. Even though purists felt it was an abomination to play Bach on anything but a harpsichord. Nevertheless, Bach’s music was based on logic and these machines were purely driven by logic. The limitations of the machine allowed the logic to work. The machine could not make chords so she had to play a single note and then stack it.
Carlos did not like the fad of electronic music at the time of which seemed to produce random sounds of bloops and bleeps. She found it to be gibberish, pseudo-intellectual and unpleasant.
Electronic music has always been associated with the cosmic. In 1962 Joe Meek had a hit with the satellite-inspired “Telstar.” He said he wanted to create a picture in music of what could be up there in outer space.
Carlos loved astronomy. She followed solar eclipses around the world. She loved the harmony of the spheres and the absolute balance and order of the solar system.
In the 1980s she bought a computer and started making digital music and was overwhelmed by the “anarchy of total possibility.”
Carlos released two other albums, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer and Sonic Seasonings (proto ambient music). She eventually remastered and released her albums, repairing the “defects.” Although her fans loved the defects–feeling like they were human side of her mechanical music. Why are none of them available?
Of course she also made music for Stanley Kubrick. A Clockwork Orange and The Shining both had her music. Although in my copy of the Clockwork Orange soundtrack, there is a biography of the composer. And it is attributed to Walter Carlos.
Even later in her life, she never got the respect she deserved either for her music or because of her gender dysphoria. People would say, “Oh, that Wendy, he’s a genius,” or they would insist on calling her Walter. Even a recent article in Pitchfork referred to her as “a trans-gendered, avant-new age synthesizer freak.” [Although that might have been a compliment].
So was she a performer or an engineer? She felt she was an arranger. Whatever label she gets, she deserves a lot more adulation.
Maybe this biography which is only 264 pages is worth a read after all.
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