Happy Birthday!

Do you know whose birthday it is today?

Hint: She is connected to Bach.
Hint: Her music in the late sixties crossed over to Classical to FM.

Wendy Carlos. It was her Moog synthesized Switched-On Bach that came out in 1968 that created a fire storm as it spread across the country. What you may not know about her is,

MEET WENDY CARLOS: THE TRANS GODMOTHER OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC
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By Natasha MacDonald-Dupuis
August 11, 2015

In 1968, Wendy Carlos took a Moog synthesizer, an unknown instrument at the time, and electronically reconstructed Johann Sebastian Bach's six "Brandenburg Concertos" into the first ever platinum-selling classical album, "Switched on Bach." The album became the most influential "electronic" classical recording of all time, smashing the borders between classical and synthesized music. It won her three Grammys and sent a message to the world that a synthesizer was a musical instrument, rather than just an obscure machine used by professors in labs to make weird robot sounds.

Carlos was born in a working-class family in Pawtucket, R.I., and started piano lessons at age six. She went on to study music and physics at Brown University and music composition with pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the first electronic music center in the U.S.A. She started working as a tape editor at Gotham Recording and struck up a friendship with Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, consequently becoming one of his first clients.

Throughout the years, Carlos influenced Moog and helped him refine his synthesizers, ultimately convincing him to add touch sensitivity to the synth keyboard for better dynamics and musicality. "Wendy has built up lyrical sounds nobody ever heard coming out of a digital synthesizer before," Moog said in a 1985 interview with People Magazine. "Nobody is in her league."

She is one of the early pioneers in the trans community and I can remember when Switched-On Bach first came out, it was by Walter Carlos then a number of years later Playboy (excerpts from the article can be found here) came out with Wendy Carlos’ transition… Wow!

So sit back and enjoy.