Wendy Carlos: Gender Through Synthesis

Wendy Carlos, born 1939, lives in New York and is completely absent from the public world, popping up once every few decades to update her website. In the ‘60s, she was creating sounds and instruments unlike anything anyone had seen or heard before, and by the ‘70s and ‘80s she had become a household name. She was known for her earth-shattering music, mastery of groundbreaking technology, and for being one of the first publicly out trans women, not only in mainstream media, but also in her incredibly prestigious fields of work. Wendy demonstrated absolute craftsmanship of electronic and analog sound design, a completely intuitive perspective into synthesis, and spent years composing and arranging some of the most influential and sonically wondrous records the world has ever heard. She brought the Moog synthesizer and greater synthesis itself into the mainstream by disguising it into a candy tablet: Bach re-compositions. She scored Stanley Kubrick’s most influential films, was instrumental in shaping the Moog synthesizer into the hardware and silhouette we all cherish, and changed the world of electronic music forever. The world has celebrated her, the powerful ones respect her, but as a society, we have failed Wendy Carlos, for we have failed to recognize the truth behind her work and her art. The world appreciated her art while ignoring her Self, unknowing that the sonic world she has created for us is intrinsically connected to her transness and identity. 

As a young trans girl born into the wrong body in Rhode Island, Wendy Carlos poured her heart and soul into the one thing that allowed her to escape — synthesis. Analog electronics, transistors, circuits, and oscillators allowed Wendy to create her own world, reaching far into the future of society and existence to a place that surpasses gender, tradition, and the regressive hold history has on our society. She spent hours crouched over breadboards, bending wires and adjusting knobs, oscillating her identity into the circuits she was wiring up as if they were her flesh. Her compositions allowed her to invite others into this utopia, a world where her existence and presentation weren’t questioned; a futuristic world that surpasses the individual’s expectations of what it means to create and listen to music, and showcases what computers and the human brain can do when they walk hand in hand.

         Wendy Carlos was full of life and excitement when synthesis was on the brink of breakthrough into the modern world. She woke Bob Moog up from a nap in a conference to tell him what she thought he should do in his next works, she describes herself as having a “big mouth” and once recounted on her website that “Stanley [Kubrick] told me I was the most outspoken, candid person he had worked with.” Wendy overflowed with joy, passion, and excitement. She saw a world in the palm of her hands, a world where she was celebrated, a world where we had all surpassed the oppressive chains of hauntology, a world where we stripped ourselves of the husks of our past and danced freely in the sun together. 

When she first began her public work, she took the world by storm. Switched on-Bach (1968) turned the world on its head, challenging the popular notion of music, and slamming the synthesizer into homes across America for the first time, becoming one of the first classical records to sell over half a million copies. People loved it; people loved her, and she felt that love and celebration. They were getting it. With excitement and fury, she created the titillating theme for Kubrick’s 1971 hit, A Clockwork Orange. The film and its soundtrack have become one of the most important pieces of media in the modern world, however, at its inception, Carlos recounts that her work genuinely scared a portion of the public: the “chorus of artificial voices” in the theme, created by a vocoder, was deeply unsettling for many audience members. Make of this what you will; maybe this excited her and motivated her, creating things that made the hair on one’s neck stand up. Maybe it made her feel scared, uncomfortable, worried that people didn’t react to her world the way they should’ve. Maybe she felt like if people feared her world, then they feared her identity, her Self…maybe people’s fear of her melodies felt like fear of her personhood, her transness, her existence. Unfortunately, I am left to do little but speculate.

Wendy started her medical transition the same year she began crafting Switched on-Bach – 1966. She was out to only her partner, and slowly began coming out to friends and family members over the years. As her estrogen levels rose, the popularity of Switched on-Bach, an album whose popularity grew exponentially and soon went platinum, bore her deadname. Her breakthrough into the world of music and media, her public existence in the world, was under the guise of someone else. As people celebrated her world and her work, they celebrated someone else, breaking Wendy’s heart a little bit every time she remembered that no one else knew she existed. Being deadnamed is more than being called by one’s “legal name.” Trans people change their names because they do not want to be referred to by their legal name, but it’s more than a name; it says that one still sees her as a man, or a man who transitioned into a woman, it is reaching past her true existence that she has borne to the world, and celebrating the Self she tries not to despise. Rather than seeing her as the woman she is, the world saw the person she yearned to never be again. This weight grew heavy on her soul, far more than she realized it would, as the album reached records surpassing anything she could’ve imagined for herself and her world. She spent ten years in stealth, disguising herself as a man for public appearances to placate herself to the public—she was terrified. The mass public was experiencing synthesis for the first time, and simultaneously, they were experiencing transness for the first time. In a time where these things are so new on the frontier that it is impossible to gauge reactions, a time when proclaiming one’s true, authentic self can be a sentence to death, she dared to grow confident. She felt the safety net of the world around her, built on appreciating her sonic world; built on appreciating her. 

She publicly came out in a candidly terrifying Playboy interview in 1979, where she recounts her ten “lost” years. She had already faced many years of torment, exile, trauma, and ridicule, and she knew that this interview would forever change the course of her world, her life, and the exterior world’s perception of her. But she says simply: “I’ve gotten tired of lying.” Following the interview, she went on to create the incredibly elaborate cinematic worlds for The Shining (1980) and Tron (1982). She was once again inviting the public into her world, and, once again, people loved it. In a 1985 interview with People, Wendy recounts her coming out very pleasantly: “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent … There had never been any of this charade to have taken place. … It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.” However, as the world changed and evolved, and as our connection to others became far more present and far-reaching, Wendy’s utopic world started to be smothered.

         She did everything she could have. She extended herself over and over again, compromised to make herself palatable, waited in the shadows for years to introduce herself, and continuously created undeniably genius works. She extended the invitation to her world time and time again, and we accepted, but then we slowly destroyed her planet from the inside. As her popularity and name grew, the widespread knowledge of her identity grew, and she faced more and more backlash. We set up homes and towns on her planet, and then polluted it with hate mail, dissections of her identity, rejections of her personhood. We wanted her music, but we made it clear that we didn’t want Her. As the electronic community, and as people, we failed Wendy Carlos, because we didn’t realize the weight she had put into her art. We took her art for granted, and not for the beautifully elaborate and dedicated world she had created for us. We stormed into the gates, ignored the welcome gifts, and failed to recognize her true Self. She told us who she was over and over again, but it fell on deaf ears: ears that heard music, and not her proclamations of Self and identity.

         She threw her Self, her respect, and her trust into her peers, the world, and her works. The only ones who welcomed and accepted her were her circuits, her wires, her oscillators, and her cats. Ticking into the early 2000s, Wendy had become a recluse. She withdrew from the exterior world, closed the gates to her world, and now meticulously cares for it alone. She had put up with enough trauma from the public world, and walked away. She talks with disdain on the world of electronica today, because she saw back in the ‘50s what the world could have become, what the world should have become, what the world was equipped to become with synthesizers and circuits. But we took these precious, delicate parts, grabbing with thoughtless grubby hands, and destroyed the meticulous beauty of synthesis; in the process, we destroyed the meticulous beauty of gender expression, representation, and transness.

         Electronic music, especially analog electronica, lends itself to transness in a way that I do not expect cisgender people to understand. It is the creation of a new world from scratch, a world that can be shaped and molded and experienced in the same way by all, a world where I can proclaim my true self in a way that feels True, given the constraints of a physical world where my True Self is unattainable absent thousands of dollars for surgeries, and hormones, and simple things such as the fact that someone born into the body of a 5’5” girl will never look the way they want to if their ideal body image is that of a 5’11” cisgender man. Absent the visual world, we are given the sonic. Picking and choosing oscillators, sound wave generators, mixing each meticulous frequency, crafting and drawing LFO patterns, wiring buttons and creating anything from a harsh growling tone to an earth-vibrating sub to a floating bell that glides on the wind like a fairy; Wendy is not just creating music for one to listen to, Wendy is elaborately crafting her gender and her Self, and is gifting it to the world.

         The world failed Wendy Carlos when it did not appreciate this gift. The world ignored Wendy, the world failed to grow alongside her in the ways she knew we all could. She expected and needed more from us, and when she realized she would never get it, she did what we all would do. She stopped asking and inviting us in. It is laughable for people to ask and wonder why she is a recluse, or to speak about her negatively in this way; seen on Reddit, one wrote: “She is extremely talented. Yet she got increasingly bitter toward pretty much everything in the first years of the 2000's. Nobody has seen or heard from her in the past 10 years, that I can find. She is a sad, bitter old soul who feels like synth technology didn't progress the way she felt it should, and is extremely bitter toward the synth world for it.” Wendy is not bitter. Wendy has set up the boundaries and walls she felt she needed because of the failure of the world around her to protect her. She was in the right rooms, the right people knew her name, she was and is respected by all, yet those same names are the ones who failed, and continue to fail, to recognize and realize the full extent of her work and who Wendy is. 

Wendy Carlos was, and is, a true beacon of transness, electronic synthesis, and analog electronica. She paved the way for me to be in the music program at NYU, for me to release music under my own name, and to be proud to declare my transness publicly. She greatly suffered, albeit she has no guilt or blame to bear. She greatly suffered not from her own bravery but from a world who was too unwilling to change and keep up with Wendy Carlos and her circuits. She suffered from a world that reared its ugly, malicious head at her when all she did was constantly gift the world her talents and existence. Wendy Carlos looked to the electronic community, her colleagues, her peers, and to the world with hope that they could focus on her genius works of art, her brilliant mastery of her craft, and live freely in the futuristic world she designed from scratch. However, they failed her —we failed her. People instead focused in and honed in on her transess and saw it as a reason to hate her. They destroyed her and her world, and we lost one of the greatest minds in analog electronics as a result.

The electronic community failed Wendy Carlos, and the younger generations who have everything to learn from her will have to pay the price. The world has already and will continue to pay the price because we are robbed of her brilliance and her works. Who knows what she has gone on to create and will create in the future. Who knows what she would have created, if the world around her was able to accept her.