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Tuning in to Wendy Carlos
by
Connor Freff Cochran
Should
you ever meet her, do not tell Wendy Carlos she changed your
life. Even if it's true. Her good honest Rhode Islander
reserve won't let her stand still to enjoy your equally good
and honest compliment: instead it'll be duck and run, and
miss the point, and let' s talk about anything else, shall
we?
So
let's talk about something else! For now, carefully ignore
that 18 years ago Wendy Carlos, in a mind-boggling display
of focus, virtuosity, and sheer physical endurance, created
a record called Switched-On
Bach
and changed all our lives. It didn't happen; it never
existed; and you and this magazine are face to face because
synthesizers have been a part of human pop culture since way
back in the early MIDIzoic, when shambling proto
Californians discovered the microprocessor and bandwidthed
together to defend themselves from vicious sawtoothed
tigers. (Facts are just facts, as Professor Peter Schickele
is fond of pointing out; can't argue with facts.)
Instead
of debating whether the field' s debt to Wendy is vast or
merely gigantic, let us focus on some of the things about
her that you don't know, that you couldn't possibly know,
because no one has ever come right out and said them in
print. Little things, true, but telling. Wendy is an avid
astronomer who has traveled all over the globe pursuing
solar eclipses; in fact, she has produced some of the
best
eclipse photos
ever taken. She' s a big fan of Carl Barks, the comic book
artist who chronicled the adventures of Donald Duck. Much of
her recording gear is self-designed and self-built or so
thoroughly modified as to blur original distinctions (the
Olde English lettering on her mixing board is a dead
giveaway). She loves hard science fiction as practiced by
masters like Arthur C. Clarke, but has little taste for pure
fantasy.
To
recuperate after an auto accident, she took to inventing
brand-new
map projections
of the globe... and then wrote her own plotter-driver
software to print them out. She loves theater organs. She
hates money/ego-obsessed yuppies. She loves garlic and spicy
ethnic foods. A sheriff in Texas once proposed to her by
mail. She lets her three Siamese
cats
drape themselves decorously over her outboard gear; never
mind the fur. She has a phenomenal capacity for attention to
detail and, like most visionaries, little patience with the
limitations of the world. Her tape editing is sharp enough
to get a razor in between a hic and a cup. She
paints
and draws,
a little. And even more than never telling her she' s
changed your life you must never, never ever ever, get her
started on puns and Monty Python routines. Not unless you do
that kind of thing too. And have no pressing engagements.
For days.
In
short, Wendy Carlos is a fascinating and diverse person.
That she's a brilliant composer whose newest (so far
unreleased) music promises to do for tuning what her first
record did for timbre... hey. Gravy.
Wendy
is one of the few people I've met whom I have no qualms
about calling a genius, with all the pluses and minuses
automatically attendant upon the term. Genius is a mixture
of qualities combined in such a way that the genius pulls
things out of the world that are: A) starkly obvious when
you know where to look, and: B) completely hidden until the
genius shows you how to look. Usually by example.
In
1968, Wendy did it with Switched On Bach. It went platinum,
the first classical record ever to do so, and whether people
bought it for love or novelty matters not one whit. All that
matters is the door was opened. Glenn Gould called it the
"album of the decade"; I'd go further and call it one of the
ten seminal recordings of the century.
It
is also the worst thing that could possibly have happened to
her career.
Think
about it. SOB was a step, not an end in itself Wendy was
exploring possibilities. Her point was to conquer a
demanding, finicky, fragile collection of wire and knobs and
patch points called a modular Moog synthesizer,
demonstrating along the way that synthesis and electronic
music were good for real art as well as in-grown academic
exercises. This the record did, making much money for
CBS...a fact CBS executives seem to have misunderstood,
supposing the secret was in Bach and the synth, rather than
the synth-player.
They
weren't alone. A wave of "Switched On Thus-and-Such" spread
locust-like through record stores (even today we aren't
free, as witness such derivative efforts as the recent
Bachbusters CD). But the real problem for Wendy was not
incompetent competition: it was confusion of identity in the
one place no recording artist can afford, her own record
company. I feel Wendy's catalog since 1968 is virtually a
case study in artist mismanagement, with her strengths
downplayed and her weakness--repetition, which she simply
has no talent for-- accentuated. This is not to say that her
original work has not seen release. But just try and find
her two record environmental sound piece, Sonic
Seasonings;
her scores for Tron and Clockwork
Orange;
her "By Request" (which is something of an historical
hodgepodge, marred by some more--gasp--Bach; but to be
treasured nevertheless for the riveting snap of "Geodesic
Dance" and the intricate musical joke called "Pompous
Circumstances"). And if you find any of these, send me a
note because my copies are long since worn out and I hanker
to hear Wendy's
music clean.
Despite
these marketplace frustrations, Wendy has never stopped
pioneering. Each of her records, including the Bach ones,
have pushed at the boundaries of available technology and
technique.
Case
in point, her last album--Digital Moonscapes. It's been out
for a year or so, but don't be surprised if you've never
heard it: this marvel of original electronic music was
dropped into the American marketplace with little or no
fanfare, promotion, or advertising, and on a classical label
(CBS Masterworks) to boot. What makes Digital
Moonscapes
special above all else is that it marks the culmination of
two years of intense research into recreating orchestral
sounds through digital synthesis. Using the GDS digital
synthesizer system she got towards the end of work on
Tron,
and a couple of its Synergy offspring, Wendy crafted what
she refers to as the "LSI Philharmonic Orchestra:" a
collection of several hundred simulations good enough to
stand with pride against the yardstick of the real thing.
(Designers and collectors of myriad DX7 patches, take note:
listen to this album and see how it should be
done.)
The
only place to go when you've gotten this far is farther.
Wendy's newest project, Beauty
in the Beast,
takes digital synthesis beyond timbral recreation into
extrapolative invention. More importantly, it
casts
off the leg-irons
of the equal-tempered scale.
Some
of you know what that last part implies. Some of you don't.
Those that don't shouldn't be ashamed, because the standard
12-note octave is so deeply a part of modern Western music
that even talented, well trained musicians take it for
granted. But it' s not Holy Writ. It's a so-so bargain
between the physics of sound and the physical limitations of
acoustic instruments, a 300-year-old
compromise
designed so that every note, in every key, is equally not
quite in tune. In other words, you can get by with it. It'll
do. But it's a long way from perfect, and there have always
been a few hardy (foolhardy?) souls trying to find their way
to a better, more musically consonant system. Unfortunately,
the same laws and limits that forced the compromise in the
first place have not been repealed, and alternate tunings
have so far proven both esoteric and impractical.
Enter
the computer. And the computer based instrument. Although
there are still massive hardware problems to solve, largely
in the areas of Controllers (taking one example, how do you
physically play a scale with 31 notes to the octave?), it is
finally possible to up anchor, sail off on the sea of
tuning, and navigate to safe harbor in new countries of
sound.
Exploring.
That's what Wendy's new album is all about. But best to let
the traveler tell the tale.
EM:
What led you in this radical a direction?
WC:
For a long time--since the early '70s--I felt I had to
get away from the compartmentalization of sounds; we had
rich acoustic sounds on one hand and impoverished
synthesizer sounds on the other. The analog synths of the
time, and even the newer digital machines, just didn't have
sophisticated enough control over sound, and the timbres
they produced quickly became very boring--to my ears, at
least. That's the reason for the orchestrational style I
developed from the first record on, in which I jump from
timbre to timbre to timbre so quickly that by slight of hand
it gives the impression of considerably greater timbral
resources than really existed within the instruments.
There
are possibly half a dozen basic sounds you can get out of an
analog machine, short of some very silly things. They're
like little islands that sound good floating in an ocean of
possibility. There's a percussive envelope/filter thing you
can do on a bright wave, and it doesn't matter much what
kind of bright wave; there's a slow attack filter that's
more like an imitation of a brass instrument; there are
nice, simple, dull waves like triangles and sines that you
can put together with either soft or hard attacks; tuned
noise, delayed vibrato, and a few others...just these
categories and a few others, and that's it. It's a little
like drawing in pen and ink. You can make solid shapes, you
can do crosshatching, you can do little dots, you can have
outlines... but it's all pen and ink, and everything else
you get is from juxtaposing these in more or less intricate,
clever ways that give the eye the impression more is
happening than really is.
EM:
Limited or no, you got a lot out of that repertoire of
sound--
WC:
My earlier pieces worked well in spite of the repertoire of
available sounds, rather than because of them. So by the
late '70s I was trying to find new and different generation
techniques, and exploring digital synthesis, when I met
Stoney Stockell and Tom Piggott and the folks behind the GDS
and Synergy. They wanted me to get involved in their
products, and Disney's Tron provided the opportunity. The
Synergy looked like the only commercial instrument that
would do the kinds of things that I wanted to do, so after
Tron I began to learn how, by developing acoustic replicas
on it. After doing 300 voices of the orchestra, I'd pretty
much tamed the instrument, and decided to record Digital
Moonscapes as a way station from the old analog world into
what the future promised. It was a way of saying "Hey look,
we can get very, very dose to the orchestra now. That's a
big step from where we used to be! And with the ambience
techniques now possible through digital time-processing and
reverberation, you see we've joined the worlds of acoustic
and electronic... that's what's possible now, and on the
next record we'll see where it can lead."
EM:
What about the way you've jettisoned standard
scales?
WC:
About the time I began the current record Stoney finally
unbuttoned the frequency tables in the Synergy, so I wrote a
bunch of custom control software that made it possible to
retune the instrument. That's something I've wanted to do
for a long time. A digital instrument is a natural for
microtonal tuning because you can be precise to any degree
you need and also repeatable. It's idiotic that Western
music has remained such a slave to a tempering system which
evolved 300 years ago as a satisfactory compromise. We don't
need the compromise anymore. We can begin to work in areas
that up to now have been forbidden because we only had the
equal-tempered scale. Where these steps may lead is anyone's
guess.
How
important these new areas will be I don't know. We'll have
to find out. I do feel they have become very important areas
to explore, and that their implications transcend me as a
human being and a composer and an artist. They're bigger
than any one person. These ideas have to be disseminated.
They mustn't become a quaint personal system, like Harry
Partch's, but must get taken as much for granted as people
now take synth work and multi-track recording. These areas
are so rich with possibilities, they are an ideal way to get
pop, classical, jazz and contemporary music out of the
cul-de-sacs they're all in, that I feel I could easily
become so filled with messianic zeal I'd probably hate
myself.
EM:
With all possible timbres, and all possible tunings,
where do you begin?
WC:
When you're given all possibilities, you're in a worse
position than you were before. It's a perfect way to drown.
In fact, you've really chosen to drown in the middle of a
very large ocean. Several oceans. And there's not even a
floating log nearby; you've discarded all that. But there
just isn't any way art can work outside of a discipline...
Stravinsky's wonderful comment when people asked him how he
felt about working on a ballet with Balanchine, because the
form was rather restrictive, was "I love exact
specifications." That's how it is with all art. It works
best when there are limits. Quite probably my earlier
records were aided greatly by the fact that they were done
while working within very narrow regions of possibility.
But
in late 1984, I found myself swamped by the anarchy of total
possibility, so I began making choices. I chose to limit
myself to some small, selected regions of the palette of
"everything." In timbre, I decided to see what would happen
if I took orchestral instruments that I understood and began
combining selected properties of two or three, creating
hybrids. That's a fairly small cast of the line... it's not
nearly what the hardware allows, but it's a good way to
learn the limits in a disciplined manner. I was mainly
concerned with learning what rich things could be developed
from models of past good instruments: the best Stradivarius
overtone structure merged with the best Steinway
action...what does that do? Does it sound good? And the
answer is yes, it does, it sounds delightful. There are in
fact several ways of doing it, and they all sound wonderful.
Or take a good Boehm clarinet and merge it with a Guenari
cello, or... you find a lot of fascinating sounds this way,
because you are standing on the shoulders of giants of the
past of timbre, and yet they are genuinely new sounds,
subtly or wildly unlike anything ever heard before.
EM:
And tuning? There's even less to stand on, outside
what we're all used to.
WC:
I cast my sights: what happens if we move out only into the
realm of tunings from other cultures? Cultures like those of
Bali, Java, India, Africa, or the Middle East...let's
explore what they've found rich for many years. And let's
also explore things that are fascinating mathematically,
like variations in the overtone series and scales built with
different numbers of equal-sized steps in an octave. Let's
find what those sound like, doing only a few of them, and
use those few as a guide. Everything might be possible
hardware wise, but I'm not capable of that, so while I have
taken big steps in tuning and timbre they are not the
biggest steps imaginable: just the biggest steps I could
take while keeping control.
EM:
In retrospect, how do you feel about taking these
steps?
WC:
As I stand here a little bit away from the coastline, the
ocean seems far bigger and far more profound than I imagined
it could be. It seems to me in hindsight that this was the
right thing to do. A wise step. But I didn't know it was
wise when I took it; I was just working from instinct. There
is no one tuning to the album, no single timbre. Each
selection is an essay that explores one or two ideas fairly
deeply, rather than a lot of them superficially. I'm like a
blind person in a room, poking a long stick in several
places to make sure there's an elephant in here, instead of
taking a sharp pencil, poking in lots of shallow places, and
deciding there's nothing in the room after all.
EM:
Did you find yourself having to fight not to think in
old, familiar ways?
WC:
Constantly. I also found that your conditioning and
learning, the things you've developed--your strengths, in
other words--can be crippling when you're trying to take new
steps, because you keep falling back into habit patterns.
Although it's self-conscious, you've got to deliberately
break your habit patterns. For example, the last album was
totally notated first, written out just like any orchestral
composition, and then played. This is an approach I know
very well, because of all the Bach records. It's a safe way
to work; not much risk. So on this new album I chose to work
in a scary way. I composed directly on tape, relying on
sketches and improvisations which were edited many, many
times and re-improvised and re-edited until they grew into
compositions...working that way, things happened that I
didn't know how to write down. And I had to hold it all in
my memory, which is scary for me because I've always had the
same crutch Stravinsky had: he used to say he didn't compose
except when he was at the drawing board with the manuscript
paper right in front of him.
EM:
You mentioned you'd been interested in alternate tunings
for a long time. When did you first start?
WC:
Oh, way back in my teens, probably from reading some
magazine articles. When I was 16, I bought a piano-tuning
hammer and wedges and began retuning my parent's spinet
piano in all manner of unorthodox tunings, trying to find
out what some of these things I'd read about sounded like
(you couldn't then find records with these things on them).
In college I got involved in musique concrete pieces with
retuned pianos and arbitrarily tuned sine waves and stuff
like that. Nothing very profound. But I got inspired to put
together a series of special reference tapes with a
physicist friend. We had access to several very expensive
audio oscillators in a Brown University laboratory, test
devices worth several thousand dollars, and we'd go in and
tune one to a 440 Hz reference signal broadcast by
short-wave radio station WWV, then tune another against it
until an oscilloscope pattern told us we'd reached the
particular ratio of our choice. Then we'd tape that.
We
ended up with a library of something under 100 pitches in an
octave, all of which were derived from pure thirds and
fifths. Most of the pro tape machines of the day tended to
run at pretty much the same speed all the time-if they did
vary from day to day it was within the limits of our
precision--so we spliced some leader ahead of the recorded
strips, labeled them, and from then on whenever we wanted to
do any precise intervals or ratios we would use the strips
as tuning references. The technology was never intended for
this purpose, but there was just no other way to make the
empirical tests necessary to take intellectual ideas about
tuning and turn them into something that might have
practical and pragmatic value. Even then I knew that you
have to have a practical application. If there's no way to
use something in a real musical context, who cares?
EM:
After that?
WC:
Well, I readjust about every book on the subject, but
after college it wasn't until 1984 that I started
experimenting with tunings again. I did have other things
going. But when I came back to tuning it was as a gleeful
child in a candy store. After Moonscapes I listened to a lot
of ethnic records, deciding what direction I wanted to take
the new album. I'd sit and try to play along with some of
the different scales, but the equal-tempered scale didn't
fit very well. It was driving me crazy. I tried minor
variations. I even explored quarter-tone scales, but these
were even less musically useful than equal-temperment and
I'm amazed that so many musicians have bothered to explore
them.
Anyway,
in July 1984, bingo, Stoney presented us with some new chips
and said look-in-there-at-byte-so-and-so, perform a
write-read, and you'll get the pitch table. At the time, I
didn't have any idea what it did, but I pulled out all the
numbers, dumped them into the Hewlett Packard 9825, and
fiddled around with them until I figured out how to do some
things. There was a small section of 12 x 2 byte values that
the Synergy actually used for tuning, with all the values
for all the other octaves derived from those through 2:1
(octave) ratios. I found the way to convert those from Hertz
into cents, wrote a piece of software that slowly grew and
grew and grew but finally made it possible, after much
hassle and lots of math and tricks, to move the notes
individually with a resolution of about 1.5 cents. It made
it very easy to set up all kinds of WHAT-IF situations. For
example, one piece on the new album, 'Just Imaginings," was
based on asking WHAT IF all the notes of the scale were
tuned to represent the closest natural harmonic overtones
from a single fundamental. That means you have to store the
overtone series for every key-note with which you want to
work. I wound up with an array of 12 times 12 (144)
different pitches in the octave, each of which represents a
pattern of the 12 closest-fit partials to a particular
fundamental. You play the piece by starting in one key and
then as you move along to another, you hit a reference key
on a special little keyboard and it instantly retunes the
whole instrument.
The
last part of this track ends by going through the entire
cycle of 12 pitches-the "circle of fifths," if you
will-except all in perfect tuning. That's one of the things
you aren't supposed to be able to do, which is exactly why I
did it! The nice thing about this Harmonic Scale, as I call
it, as opposed to normal just intonation, is that you can
put down a cluster, just play anything, like a
three-year-old kid, and it will always be in tune. The
accompaniment at the end is a continuous cluster. Every note
remains down, but from moment to moment all the notes are
slightly retuned to match whatever note the melody and bass
is playing, so the same cluster always harmonizes the melody
perfectly.
EM:
What about the other tracks? You've got an
African-inspired piece, a gamelan-inspired
piece...
WC:
In 1983, chasing an eclipse, I spent some time in Bali
and fell in love with the place. Had to write music "about"
the experience. "Poem For Bali" is in authentic tunings
taken from cassette recordings I made and bought when I was
there, and also on a few records I've found since. (The
tunings aren't based on any textbook descriptions--it turns
out there are a lot of discrepancies between what's in print
and what's really used.) The piece has ten sections written
wholly in several varieties of Pelog (and one Slendro)
tunings used by Balinese gamelans. Near the very end is a
dance which I turn into a concerto for gamelan with symphony
orchestra. That's a stunt that can't be done in real life
because of tuning differences, but when you hear it here
you'll wish it could be, because it's a really great stunt.
The funny thing about gamelans is that their scales sound
pretty horrible on our western instruments, but are really
damned good scales on theirs. And it isn't because they are
somehow quaint savages or primitives who only have five
notes--you know, that condescending "hey, maybe someday
they'll get to seven" attitude Western music takes-but
because they found a way that empirically fits the overtone
structure of their instruments. And their tunings work well
there. Ours don't. In fact, our pure octave commandment
number 1, "though shalt not use anything but 2:1 for an
octave"-sounds pretty awful on their instruments. It sounds
flat.
EM:
If each step of exploration is built on the previous one,
I expect the last track you finished must have been pretty
unusual. Which one was it?
WC:
"Beauty in the Beast." It's sort of a rondo-like form,
with two main themes that come round and round again, always
in motion. This track could only be written for the
electronic medium. It's built on two scales I discovered.
One uses 78 cents per step, which is what you get if you
split a pure minor third into four equal parts; it happens
that if you do that you have virtually perfect triads, but
no octaves, creating beautiful harmonies and very exotic
melodies, because the steps are so strange. Motion from
chord to chord is unlike anything you've ever heard, and yet
the arrival points are so perfectly in tune that you know
it's something very natural to us, for all its wildness,
something distant and strange and yet at home and peaceful.
The other scale is derived very much the same way, but from
a a perfect fourth broken into four equal steps of about 125
cents, and then splitting each of these in half. We have a
hard time describing a split fourth melody because we've
never heard that in Western music. But it works! And the
track as a whole is kind of a whimsical blending of two
different quasi-grotesque ideas in the very best "Ballet
Ruse" style.
EM:
You actually started dispensing with the octave entirely,
then?
WC:
After the album was recorded I started exploring tunings
in a more analytical fashion, using the Hewlett-Packard 9825
and some programs I wrote to plot the "fit" of different
intervals as you change the number or size of equal steps in
an octave. Twelve steps in an octave happens to hit the
fifth well, as we know. It doesn't do as good a job on the
thirds; sixths are a little better. The next good fit occurs
as we move on to 15 steps. That one actually misses the
fifth, the third, and the minor third by being a little too
small, but it is also equally a little too large for the
fourths and the sixths .... not bad, but kind of equally out
all the way around.
Nineteen
steps fits the minor third almost exactly, but is less good
on the major third and the fifth. After that it isn't until
31 steps that things start to get interesting: the minor
third is not quite perfect, but the rest all group together
very high in consonance. That includes the seventh harmonic.
There's an oddly near-perfect group near 34 steps, but the
next most useful is perhaps at 53 steps--it sits really
nicely on a crest--and another one that sits a little less
well occurs at 65 steps in the octave. And so on, to an
infinite number of steps! But if we take away the
restriction of having only scales which form an octave, if
we throw out the octave completely, use the hardware to get
our octaves through 16', 8', 4', and so on, and say okay,
just within one octave let us make equal step divisions,
because equal steps are lovely: they allow you to modulate
conveniently and linearly all over the place...whooptedoo!
We start finding some really remarkable configurations,
including the tunings I used in "Beauty in the Beast." I
hadn't plotted and figured these out when I composed that
piece, but afterwards I wanted to know why it worked so
well, and here it is.
And
since this is virgin territory, like Christopher Columbus I
hereby christen these three peaks in the plot Carlos Alpha,
Beta, and Gamma. Alpha is the temperament that "Beauty in
the Beast" is written in, the equal splitting of the minor
third. Beta is the interlude that starts it, the divided
fourth. Notice that these things, in cents, are simple
numbers. Alpha has steps of 78 cents...but that's equivalent
to something like 15-and-a-third steps in an octave, which
makes no sense. How do you put a third of a step in an
octave? Build in scales with hiccups? It has to be treated
as a special case. But throw out this one unorthodox quality
by handling it with the hardware, leaving only the harmonic
point of view, and it's a great tuning. With an approach
like this, we can get very close to just intonation without
any of the problems that prompted people to say "oh,just
intonation simply doesn't work." Well, in a practical world,
here it is.
EM:
What about Gamma? Worked with that one yet?
WC:
No, I'm waiting for Stoney to get me a way to play more
than 12 notes meaningfully at one time. Gamma has something
like 34.5 steps per octave, and arranged on a normal
keyboard even someone with huge hands simply couldn't
physically span more than a third. A fourth would be out of
the question.
EM:
Of course, these things can always be explored
with multi-track recording.
WC:
For final performances, sure! But for composing and gaining
familiarity it isn't an easy way to work. I'm a composer who
very much believes in the Debussy dictum: "do whatever
please the ear, and the rules be damned." There have been a
lot of proposed tuning variations in the last 200 years,
different kinds of keyboards and controllers, but nothing
has actually changed. The number of people using any of
these alternative systems has always been appallingly small.
The feedback I'm getting now suggests that a sizable number
of people are getting interested in alternative tunings, but
will a real majority adopt it? Probably not.
There's
one very good reason, laziness. In these areas, most
musicians you encounter, and most musical theoreticians for
that matter, are just very lazy. It's a human foible we all
share. I can tell you that after doing the perfect tunings
piece, 'Just Imaginings," in which there was a passage of
only two measures that took over 12 hours to compose six
chords, I'm not so sure I won't flee to their side very
soon! In some ways it's preposterous that the difficulty of
using these things is so great. But that's the price of
admission. You're not going to find anyone looking for a
fast dollar coming into this at all. Those who do will run
in and run right back out again. On the other hand, with
Alpha--and maybe even Beta--and a practical keyboard, you
could become an empirical musician. You could just comp on
it and start finding things that sound good to your ear,
then put them in your MIDI sequencer or what have you... it
would actually allow you to write music in these tunings
without quite knowing what you're doing, which is how I went
about "Beauty in the Beast."
EM:
Sequencers would be ideal for just slinging
experiments around, for editing later.
WC:
Even so, I find I like the idea of not having anything
stored rigidly, because as I move from tuning to tuning the
way the melody wants to move is different for me. It's less
interesting to take some existing tune and move it around
from one temperament to another. That might be useful as an
exercise, as an etude, as a quick way of getting some
results out. But I think that if you're going to really
explore the depth of these things, you've got to allow the
implications of the particular tuning to steer you. You
can't be dogmatic. You can't go in with preconceptions, or
you'll just be overlooking the true beauty and power of the
particular scale.
EM:
What about the next generation of instrument technology?
Could it knock down enough barriers to attract a lot of
people to new tunings?
WC:
It might. If the manufacturers get feedback from people
who want to cut with their cutting edges, instead of
sloughing. Me, I'm very impatient. I'm discovering how
different timbres demand different tunings, such as the
Balinese examples. You can put together any kind of sound
and hear what sorts of tuning it cries out for (literally).
In this arena, tuning and timbre are really kind of the same
thing: overlapping and combining overtones in a pleasing
way. It's a very exciting place to be, but also very
frustrating, because the support hardware, new keyboards and
the rest, are not at all in place and it will require the
expenditure of much time and money to get there.
EM:
You are on the way, though.
WC:
If, as it often seems, everybody else wants to waste these
new tools doing diatonic new age equal-tempered tunes and
triads, fine. Let them. But before I die I want to find out
what lies beyond all these new horizons. And I'm doing it
for the best motive in the world: I'm curious.
Addendum
Beauty
in the Beast is currently scheduled for a November release
through JEM records. Wendy's contract with CBS concludes
with a "lecture-with-musical-examples" record tentatively
called Wendy Carlos' Guide To Electronic Orchestration,
after which Wendy, like all good explorers, will be moving
on.
(Freff
lives in Brooklyn with three friends, three cats, seven
computers, and a recording studio. Aside from drowning in
article deadlines, he writes documentation for synths and
software, is the American reporter for a BBC show about
computers, and is working on various book and record
projects.)
Postscript
1999/2005
Freff,
who lives in Los Angeles, now regularly uses his complete
name, Connor Freff Cochran. Connor is multitalented: as a
writer, producer, musician, artist and has his hands in many
fascinating areas at the same time, great ideas as always.
As good friends, we often think back on the days when it
seemed a bit easier to change the world. The
Audion
company folded shortly after "Beauty in the Beast "was
released, and very few copies were ever made available,
alas, for what Carlos still states to be her "most important
recording" (a new
remasted deluxe edition is available from
ESD.)
The CBS final album was called
"Secrets
of Synthesis",
and is
also availabel from
ESD.
There was an independently contracted album AFTER this final
one, the Peter
and the Wolf parody,
described elsewhere. Carlos has "moved on", as the article
says -- indeed, this web site documents many of the new
windmills that she has tilted-at in the dozen years+ since
this article first appeared, in the November 1986 issue of
Electronic
Musician
magazine.
©
1999-2007 Connor Cochran, Electronic Musician and Serendip
LLC. No images, text,
graphics or design may be reproduced without permission. All
Rights Reserved.
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