Fly-By-Wire Bach

Wendy Carlos:
Switched-on Boxed Set
--Switched-On Bach
--The Well-Tempered Synthesizer
--Switched-On Bach II
--Switched-On Brandenburgs

East Side Digital ESD 81422

Wendy Carlos's original Switched-On Bach (1968) was one of my first classical music enthusiasms. My parents had an 8-track player in our family room (shaped like an old-fashioned diver's helmet, except made of white plastic), and this was one of the releases that was send by default when they joined one of those get-a-thousand-releases-for-a-penny schemes. At first I just found it sonically interesting, a bunch of bleeps and bloops that were clearly rather painstakingly assembled. But over time the whole business came to seem a good deal more serious in intent. In addition to introducing people to the Moog Synthesizer, it brought Bach into a bunch more living rooms, which can't be a bad thing. Carlos never desired, I think, to lean more toward erudition than entertainment, but neither was it just some crackpot marketing scheme. On the strength of this release, I found myself increasingly interested in her subsequent releases.

A few years ago, a Minneapolis company, East Side Digital, released the original Bach- and Baroque-related releases in a lovely boxed set. In addition to re-mastered recordings, the box includes superb documentation and a bunch of extras--photos, interviews, sound files, web site access. I snatched it up immediately. (They have also re-released Carlos's other recordings.)



I think these recordings deserve to be better known today, no matter that the first Bach album was a million-seller in its day. Quite apart from dealing with really peerless repertoire, they chronicle a seminal moment in the history of electronic music, the arrival of sound synthesis as something worthy of serious consideration by the mainstream music-listening public. For lovers of pure sound and sound manipulation, these recordings are documents from the frontier of a new age.

Robert Moog developed his analog synthesizer a couple decades after the arrival on the scene of the Ondes-Martenot and the Theramin. Each of these instruments represents an attempt to bridge the new capabilities with established protocols (though the Theramin looked and sounded--still does--like something imported from another solar system; it is played by manipulation of electric fields around the instrument, accomplished by the musician moving the hands in a kind of combination of hand puppetry and thespian seizure practice. The resulting sound is pure Jetsons, or maybe Twilight Zone). The famous Hammond electric organ dates from the same pre-Moog period, and represented yet another attempt to bring electricity into the musical world, all of them together looking rather like Galapagos finches rushing to fill every little existential void.

Though Moog was originally a Theramin player and builder, his idea with the synthesizer was to control the envelope of a sound in every particular, thus enabling a player to create virtually any simple waveform. Controls were included for choice of basic wave form via an oscillator--square, sawtooth, sine or noise--and for manipulation of four basic parameters: attack, decay, sustain and release. To these controls were added various filters and the like, all routed and connected by patch cords like a WWII telephone operator. Pictures of Carlos's studios over the years are fabulously chaotic, and the idea of sophisticated music coming from this contraption seems unlikely. A little time spent with the Moog made clear to everyone that most sounds are much more complex than what could be produced via the simple waveform controls, but even for a first step it was a huge one.



This sound production technology was in its infancy here and was quickly evolving--something immediately evident with each new release by Carlos, where the sound became smoother and more controlled and the timbres more and more complex. But the means of recording these sounds was also in its infancy and experiencing rapid, symbiotic change. In the beginning, far from having digital recording and Pro Tools, there was not even stereo. The very concept of high fidelity sound--HiFi--was itself fairly new. While Robert Moog was busy trying to define and then extend the new keyboard instrument's capabilities, Wendy Carlos was working with him and also trying to figure out how to make complex music on what was simultaneously a futuristic and crude device. Carlos had to develop techniques for getting monodic lines from individual monaural recordings bounced together so as to sound like they were performed simultaneously, and so on and so on until one had orchestral-sounding music. The fact that the sounds were actually electric signals put directly onto tape makes everything very immediate--there is no intervening acoustical or capturing issues like one has with a live recording. There's nothing on the recording except what the artist specifically places there.

But even that was very limited. The early synthesizers had no touch sensitivity (though Moog came up with a rudimentary one quite quickly), and could play only one note at a time. People typically don't understand this: you could not play chords on the Moog synthesizer--everything had to be recorded one note at a time (so a simple triad took three passes with the tape recorder.) Thus, the number of passes required to put each track on these CDs in the can is deceptively high--a really tremendous amount of very painstaking work. From step one they were up against the limitations of all the machinery, and the first Switched-On Bach album (well, the later ones too) was a snapshot of the cutting edge of a quickly-expanding musical horizon.

My wife finds these sounds highly irritating, and indeed they are quite raw, especially on the first Switched-On Bach album. The controllable parameters were relatively few, and so the resulting sounds were very basic (like Carlos herself says: "salty, sweet, sour"). For all the newness on display, there is not a lot of subtlety. Intonation and timing represented real challenges, and one can sense just what mountain needed to be climbed to bring us the finished product. But there is an electricity (sorry) to these recordings, a sense of restrictions tumbling down and a thrilling cosmos opening in front of one. To know what the sound really is, and how it came to be, makes these recordings like peering into a forgotten black and white photograph.

But what really saves these recordings and seals their merit for posterity is the fundamental musicality of Wendy Carlos. Even while getting her hands dirty with all the technical gobbledygook (which stuff I happen to love), she never forgets the ultimate goal: to make music. The music of Bach, ever versatile and adaptable (which is proven beyond doubt here), is given a respectful and knowing treatment at the hands of this new technology. Well, mostly. The instrument is limited in its capacity for playing tender, expressive lines--you wouldn't use it to replace, say, a solo violin--but in payment for that sacrifice it offers great clarity, unlimited frequency range, and the ability to produce sounds never heard before. I don't know that I prefer any of these performances over my favorite recordings of the instruments Bach had in mind, but I've still listened to these synthesizer recordings an awful lot. And they hold up really well.