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SEMIBEGUN 005: GOTTA SWITCH ON TO GO OFF

Amidst the richness of Wendy Carlos’ electronic orchestrations lies an element of hokeyness, at once charming and outmoded, that pervades her immensely influential album Switched-on Bach. The many imitation records, the more gimmicky and lower quality projects in particular, amplify that sliver of antiquated corniness to palpable levels. It’s odd to think that simple waveforms can sound old. The timbral palette of the Moog 900 Series, shaped by the recording/mixing decisions of Carlos and Producer Rachel Elkind, emerges as specifically and deliberately out of time while also undeniably belonging to the mid-to-late twentieth century. The early analog synthesizer crafted sounds of fantasy, speculative futures, and unknown worlds. The first fully electronic score accompanied the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet. A synthesized sonic world conjured by composers Bebe and Louis Barron shifts fluidly between underscoring, sound design, and diegetic music. The same synthesized tones heighten a scene’s tension, animate spaceship technologies, and illustrate the music of a 20,000-year long-gone civilization on this alien planet. The electronic sounds of Forbidden Planet flesh out another world’s past and our own world’s vintage conception of future. American composer and bandleader Sun Ra too used his Moog to probe the depths of the intergalactic world he and the Arkestra created as, described by Robert Barry, “a means of launching music into outer space.”[1]

Helping fuel the science fiction imagination, electronic music veered into and around the realm of scientific and technological research. Throughout the twentieth century, innovations in music technology were achieved in service of academic interests, avant-garde art making, and military research. Leon Theremin developed his eponymous instrument while researching radio technology at the Red Army Military Radiotechnical Lab under Vladimir Lenin.[2] German-American engineer Semi Joseph Begun advanced magnetic recording during World War II with funding through the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC).[3] Outside of the military, electronic music production took place within state-sponsored facilities like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and within private universities States like the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where Wendy Carlos spent time as a student assistant in the 1960s. Between electronic music and total serialism, a highly structured complex composition technique, composition as an academic discipline breached the world of STEM. Much of the Center’s artistic output married a strain of avant-garde modernist austerity found in mid-century concert music with synthesized and tape-based electronic techniques. So how does Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center become Switched On Santa?

When Switched-On Bach debuted in 1968 the field of electronic music consisted primarily of specialists, predominantly white educated men heavily invested in an avant-gardism described by Roshanak Kheshti in her book Switched-on Bach as “rooted in the idea that the vanguard of aesthetic innovation would be, at least initially, intolerable to the general public of any society.”[4] Much avant-garde experimentalism remains inaccessible to general audiences. My mom’s a good sport but she’d rather listen to Bruce Springsteen on satellite radio than endure the alienating experience of attending a new music concert. Unless you’re open minded, exposed, instructed, or disciplined to cultivate your ears, avant-garde electronic music will sound like intolerable toilet noises and chaotic beeps. Which, again, was potentially by design. With her electronic orchestrations of Bach, Wendy Carlos presented the masses with a form of electronic music easily read as musical. Robert Moog, inventor of the instrument used on the record, recognizes her influence popularizing the Moog synthesizer: “To appreciate the historical significance of Switched-on Bach, one must remember that in 1968 most people thought that electronic music was an avant-garde endeavor that had little connection with traditional musical values… Throughout the world, far more people know of electronic music and the synthesizer through Switched-on Bach than through any other musical endeavor.”[5]

Her influence is also easily measured by the sheer number and diversity of Switched-on imitations. Gil Trythall brings electronic music to the Grand Ole Opry with Switched On Nashville. The Moog receives a festive treatment in Switched On Santa. An often out of tune “Maple Leaf Rag” from Gatsby’s World - Turned On Joplin plods along while honoring Scott Joplin’s preferred slower tempo. The Happy Moog! is entirely as advertised. On Yankee Transcendoodle, Joseph Byrd of experimental rock band The United States of America presents patriotic classics as they were meant to be heard—on a synthesizer—to commemorate the bicentennial of the country. Richard Hayman’s noisy rendition of Little Anthony and the Imperials R&B hit “Goin’ Out Of My Head” matches the experimental sound design of Dick Hyman’s bird song interlude in “Blackbird.” The Moog Machine’s “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In,” a tune popular with Moogsploitation records perhaps for its space-hippie vibes, sits on the weaker end of the spectrum with its lifeless, discordant tones and a blundering beat change. The rest of Switched-On Rock doesn’t boast much higher quality. The blue ribbon for weirdest goes to The Sounds of Love ...A to Zzzz, Sensuously SINthesized, an album by Fred Miller that features a woman’s voice moaning over dreadful arrangements of Ravel and bizarre original tunes that range from plaintive to brutal. While the poorly mixed, carelessly performed, terribly uninspired arrangements approach unlistenable, the far opposite end of the spectrum harbors sonic exuberance. The Mighty Moog’s arrangement of “Malagueña” by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona is an exquisite example of electronic orchestration with a fullness and depth that matches, if not surpasses, that of the modern symphony orchestra. And this topic cannot be addressed without including master of synthesizer arrangements Isao Tomita, whose work demands equal attention to what’s being given to Wendy Carlos here. Amongst most of the crowd, the painstaking amount of detail audible on Switched-on Bach in terms of studio production and command of the machine set it apart from the rest.

It’s not fair to call all these records knockoffs or imitations, even if the lower quality albums bearing the name “Switched-on” were undeniably made in its image. Each theme, whether country or ragtime, attempts to expand the reach of the synthesizer and the borders of electronic music..Wendy Carlos and the numerous artists working in her spirit placed the synthesizer into the popular consciousness. This is the pioneering legacy of Switched-on Bach.

1. Robert Barry, The Music of the Future (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 51.
2. Roshanak Kheshti, Switched-on Bach (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 45.
3. "NIHF Inductee Semi Begun Invented Magnetic Recording," invent.org, <https://www.invent.org/inductees/semi-joseph-begun>.
4. Kheshti, Switched-on Bach, 78.
5. Wendy Carlos, Switched-on Boxed Set, Book Two: Original Notes (Minneapolis: East Side Digital, 1999), 38.