Here Is A Question: What Does Trans And “Switched On Bach” Have In Common?

If you know your trans history and music history you will know that Wendy Carlos used a Moog  Synthesizer to make “Switched On Bach” which was a breakthrough for synthesized music, it was a landmark album… but also breakthrough for trans people.

Moogfest Shines a Spotlight on Female, Nonbinary and Transgender Musicians
New York Times
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
December 6, 2017

The music, ideas and technology conference Moogfest is responding to a complaint that was voiced often over the last year — that music festivals frequently overlook or under-book L.G.B.T. artists and women — by beginning to roll out its 2018 lineup with an announcement of female, nonbinary and transgender performers.

The event, which runs May 17-20 in Durham, N.C., will feature the D.J.s Honey Dijon and Ellen Allien; the mysterious British pop producer-musician Sophie; the multidisciplinary sound explorer Fatima Al Qadiri; LCD Soundsystem’s synthesizer maven Gavin Rayna Russom; and the Japanese percussionist and composer Midori Takada, among others. A keynote conversation with Chelsea Manning will close the festival. Additional artists will be announced in January.

Many trans people do not know about trans people who lead the way, one of them was Wendy Carlos…

Meet Wendy Carlos: The Trans Godmother of Electronic Music
In 1968, Wendy Carlos brought electronic sounds into the mainstream.
Thump VICE
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.
" The early electronic instrumentation was not of a kind that allowed you do the literal-minded sampling of every instrumental note to try to assemble later. That became too much like pasted clip art. You ' d have to take a sample, say, of every way that a head can face, and all the expressions, the hand motions, and then try to create real art from pieces." Carlos muses about her earlier creative processes in a 2007 interview with Frank J. Oteri.

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.

[…]
In 1971, Carlos famously composed and recorded music for the soundtrack of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, which included her reinterpretation of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique used during the opening scene. She went on to score and perform soundtracks for The Shining, and the original Tron, which incorporated orchestra, chorus, organ, and both analog and digital synthesizers.

She did an interview for Playboy in 1979,

Carlos was born on November 14, 1939, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He took up the piano at six, went on to study music and physics at Brown University and earned a masters in music at Columbia. One of his teachers there was the pioneer electronic composer Vladimir Ussachevsky. A year before graduation, Carlos began collaborating with engineer Robert Moog. Their vision was to produce an instrument whose sound was as expressive as the piano’s: It was to be an instrument that grew out of what had gone before, much as the piano grew out of the clavichord. The synthesizer was the result. Unlike the piano or the electric organ, one had to perform a single note at a time on the synthesizer, searching for the right timbre and its right adjustment, then combine many performances of the individual colors and musical lines, using multitrack studio practices. To work it most effectively, one had to be a conductor, performer, composer, acoustician and instrument builder. Carlos was all of those.
[…]
In 1971, Elkind heard that Stanley Kubrick was planning to direct “A Clockwork Orange,” based on Anthony Burgess’ bizarre, violent, futuristic novel. She called Kubrick’s attorney and suggested that Kubrick consider the synthesizer as a novel way of scoring his movie. “The attorney said he’d get our stuff to Kubrick via air freight,” recalls Elkind. “I sent him “Switched-On Bach” and “The Well-Tempered Synthesizer.” Kubrick’s assistant called a few days later. He asked if we could come to England immediately. Two days later, we were on a flight.”

What eventually resulted was a sound track that The New York Times  lauded. “As sheer music,” its critic wrote, “it is a giant step boast the banalities of most contemporary film tracks.”

Wendy Carlos a true Pioneer for the trans community.