"Silent" Partner

A web site like this is the place to "set the record straight". Many of the pages herein have been assembled to do just that: on the historical, musical, and technical background, and how these albums I was fortunate enough to be a part of, came to be. But there's a notable contribution that's often bypassed, one that was important during the inception of my music from about 1967 until 1980 or so. There was a "silent partner" for all of these projects, who was seldom credited properly. Many of you will guess that I'm referring to Rachel Elkind-Tourre, the "Rachel" whose name is mentioned frequently within these pages, while it appears on all of our albums: "Produced by Rachel Elkind". And her contributions frequently included more than production, into the creative realm. (An issue of Keyboard magazine contained the single respectable interview with her, back in December of 1979.)
 
Above is a photo that was taken for the CBS's promotion of the Switched-On Brandenburgs, which came out in 1979. (I believe the photographer was Don Hunstein, who also took many of the best-known photos of Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist and prodigy.) That's the "mature" Moog synthesizer behind Rachel in this shot, taken in the studio that comprised the lowest floor of the West Side brownstone that Rachel and her wise mother had purchased before I met them (and when the market was not yet ruined by speculators!,) then repaired and renovated into the house I also lived and worked in for nearly a decade. (I was saddened when Rachel and her husband, Yves, sold it recently.)
 
When I met Rachel, she was working at a recording studio in New York City. She had worked closely as the secretary to Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records (look at most any CBS album from the 50's and 60's...) She'd also been an active performing artist, a singer of jazz and show music, and some classical background, too. I love her wide-range, mellow, flexible voice. But being rather shy, she was never fully comfortable in the spotlight herself, and chose to do what in Hollywood would be termed: "going behind the camera". It wasn't until the Winter movement of Sonic Seasonings that she finally relented and recorded that haunting vocalise many of you have commented on so favorably. Just prior to that, in the Beethoven Ninth last movement we realized with our early vocoder you can hear her spirited articulations on the "singing synths". But Winter was Rachel's natural voice, whirled around the stereospace. There were several other unique performances she recorded during the 70's, including one that gives the "sizzle" to the opening title music to Kubrick's The Shining.
 
Rachel, who came to NYC from San Francisco with hopes to be a jazz singer, brought a important quality of spontaneity to my music, and helped me to shed some of the stuffier conceits one can acquire from formal music studies in Ye Olde Ivy League. In the Keyboard article I mentioned, she admitted to Dominic Milano: "I'm a real tyrant, and go for the moment more than anything. And I think that Wendy is a better performer because of it. If there's any criticism of our music, it's that it's over-polished, and I try very hard to work against that instinct to over-polish, which is inherent to the kind of music we do. The synthesizer is very unforgiving."
 
I've been asked by many of you about Rachel before, so you can read my reply in an earlier Open Letter 1 and Open Letter 3, some notes about the brownstone studio on the Photos Page, and the details of the birth of Switched-On Bach, in the album notes for SOB 2000, including when we met, why she'd been critical to my success, and the early interest in the Synthesizer. She also chased the 1972 total eclipse with me, and was the organizer and brains behind the extremely rigorous Big African Expedition in 1973. If she knew I was writing this page about her, I think she'd be rather embarrassed by it, and might fear it could be an invasion of her privacy. I don't intend to betray her confidences, there's nothing really confidential herein. But it would be absolutely wrong not to have a place on this web site that acknowledges some of her contributions.
 
I think Rachel might be proudest to have been the very first person to realize how "natural" an album entirely of Bach's music on synthesizer would be for many listeners. She came up with the concept and many key issues for SOB, while I was mainly interested in doing my own music (still am, being a composer -- sorry about that, folks.) The first albums may have "stereotyped" us as classical music performers, producers, and "realizers" for a while, but it was a very effective way to burst upon the music scene as complete unknowns. Although Rachel produced albums by other good musicians (Albert Dailey, the jazz-pianist's jazz pianist, Joao Gilberto, that reclusive Brazilian Bassa-Nova composer and performer, and an excellent Easy Listening group of the early 70's, "MichaelAngelo", among others,) I guess the albums we collaborated on remain her best-known recordings.
 
Rachel thought up the core idea for Sonic Seasonings, although I jumped into it once I saw this was a "natural" for our abilities/facilities at that time, and hopefully for the public. On that one we were rather way early for the big wave of "New Age" that took about another ten years to commence and remains strong to this day (ah, the sweet rewards of innovation, not to mention the arrows in the butt, which is the best way to detect a pioneer...),. She first suggested the concept behind our wicked-witted Pompous Circumstances, the featured piece on By Request, while my skills were better suited to the detailed composing. (It will be remastered to CD on ESD, at the end of 1999, by the way.)
 
For some ten years we came up with most of our music together, spinning new ideas and things to try for weeks and months until something took root. We brainstormed together all of one frigid Winter to "invent" and assemble Timesteps, fighting to make it work with the then frustratingly primitive tools. I found her musical training and performance skills impressive, not as formally "schooled" as mine, but more practical and open to experimentation. I was not fully prepared to find myself working with another creative composing / conceptualizing partner. It was novel, composers do not often collaborate, you know, and it took a while to work out efficient ways of communicating those fragile beings that initial creative ideas are, without letting egos get in the way. I enjoyed those years, and found it sad to see them come to and end, when Rachel decided to move onto other interests, people and places in 1980. She was married, and had made plans to live with Yves in France. It was time to move on.
 
It took me a while to regroup and regain an ability to work solo again as I have since 1980, and for a long while it felt frustrating not to have Rachel's experience and ears to bounce ideas and fragments off of. It was a subtle, often complex, working arrangement. I felt over and over again that her side of the collaboration back then was minimized, and might continue to be ignored, as it has over the years. I also admit to having been frustrated at how she introvertedly refused to take a bow for the work she did. We had arguments over that one... (I lost.)
 
I'll eventually get some more coherent details up here on the way I remember it felt to assemble music with our early, quite limited instruments, and try to recapture the experience for those of you who have expressed an interest in the way we worked together all those years. After all, "Retro" this and that seems to be a popular topic at the end of the century. But for now I hope this small page will at least familiarize many of you with Rachel's important contributions to those first eight albums in a candid way that might be inappropriate to an album's liner notes. It's a fair way of publishing some of a seldom-told story, as best as I can remember it, out over the electromagnetic spectrum of the Web.

--Wendy Carlos

(last updated 7/17/01)

Since writing the above, I found another photo of Rachel (click it or the one at the top for a large view), this time it's one I took myself, when we had first gotten the brownstone studio operating, just before starting on work on Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange music score. That would have been the Summer of 1971. We'd recently gotten a collection of photo lights, and thought it might be fun to try them out. So Rachel let me photograph her, and she took a few shots of me, in the new studio space. You can see that there is not much equipment in the rack just behind Rachel, and the lower part of the rack to its right. These got filled during the next several years, of course!
 
I've always liked this shot, and while it may be posed, it still has an honest, open quality that still makes me smile with memories. Here's a bit of trivia: Rachel has a stopwatch in her hand, something we used often in trying to work out the form and tempo needed in our music. That would be set down as a first step, in a click or cue track on the tape -- if we got it wrong, the whole thing would have to be redone! So we took some pains to do it right... Very different from the present conveniences, that allow you to change your mind after the fact, when the sound itself can alter your perceptions. For scoring to film, timing was essential and critical
 
Also behind and above Rachel's hand you'll see the red digits of a "digital" stopclock/timer. This was something Rachel discovered, and voted that we build one into the console. Remember that back then pocket calculators were just a glint in the eye of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, so this relatively compact unit, with five special numeric-display "Nixie" tubes, was "the cat's meow"...! Very sexy piece of hardware, that we used until it died a few years later. Then the space went over to six mike preamp pads, since we were doing a lot of live recording then, and the timers were no longer available.
 
I see something else worth a note: the faders to the right of Rachel's sleeve are the original Altec units, of an early kind called "ladders" (if you don't know why, you don't want to.) We found them to be often noisy and rather stiff, and so were among the first to replace these with the new conductive plastic style pioneered by Penny and Giles in the mid 70's. Rachel always has been a good detective (like finding the timer,) and would locate some non-obvious solutions for problems that we'd notice while working intensely on one project or another. The P&G faders have worked wonderfully all these years, needing only an occasional rare internal cleaning.
 
It's not inappropriate to show Rachel in this pose, as she often sat in this spot while we were working together (I'd be in another chair in front of the synth), and she was usually the one with the stopwatch. Producers may occasionally need to do critical timings, but not so many producers were as involved in the often animation-like tedium that was required to make studio electroacoustic music in the 1970's.

--Wendy Carlos

(Added 1/24/99.)

While digging through a stack of equipment manuals today, what should turn up but another good quality photo of Rachel, taken around the same time as the photo just above this one, in the early 70's (how it got there is beyond me!) We'd been trying to learn how to use some new darkroom tools we'd just gotten, and wanted to perfect our photography and lighting sophistication. Down into the studio we went, carrying cameras and photofloods and tripods, to compare both 35 mm and 2 1/4" formats. We took a few shots of each other, some of just the studio itself, and each evening processed the color negatives ourselves. This trial and error routine went on for many sessions, spread out over a few weeks.
 
Then I made the usual contact prints of what we'd gotten, and chose a few frames to turn into 8" x 10" prints, with a new Chromeaga enlarger. I've not yet been able to find all the negatives and contacts from several such learning sessions, but am pleased to have located yet another one of the final test prints. I remember this as being a more informal pose of Rachel that we could use for magazine interviews or promotional material. I was surprised to discover she had a cigarette in her hand here (along with the ubiquitous stopwatch) as she bravely gave up smoking not long afterwards, and has not smoked at all since then (the way to go for all smokers -- to become EX-smokers).
 
This pose also benefits from a lower camera position, and somewhat more uniform lighting of the background. It would have been taken after the above pose had been printed and studied, as we were trying to learn by doing, trial and error. The lighting was still not perfect, but the print came out nicely. I remember that there was such an 8 by 10 around, but couldn't find it in time to show you when this page was last worked on. Now that situation can be corrected.

--Wendy Carlos

(Added 12/18/00.)

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