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The New York Times

October 5, 1969

A Tale Of A Man and a Moog
By Donal HENAHAN

CLASSICAL music was born free and everywhere is in chains, as Rousseau didn't quite put it. Almost everywhere, anyway. Here and there a performer or a composer can be found filing away at the bonds, sometimes skillfully, sometimes so brutally that poor, old music's leg is in danger of being lopped off in the process.

Among the would-be liberators, none has had more success with the public than Walter Carlos, whose switched-On Bach is still, more than a year after its release by Columbia, the best-selling classical album, and the producer of the sweetest cash-register melodies since Van Cliburn delivered himself of the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor more than 10 years ago. "Switched-On Bach" has also switched on many non classical listeners, and was for some months in the Top-40 charts of popular records.
Carlos now has a successor to his Bach disk ready for release (also on Columbia), a second baroque expedition entitled Walter Carlos and the Well-Tempered Synthesizer. Like "Switched-On Bach" (or S.O.B., as its detractors say for short), the new disk has Bach (the Brandenburg Concerto No. 4), in addition to Handel, Monteverdi and Scarlatti. It also has- hold it, now- a simulacrum of human voices, synthesized on Carlos's own expanded and exfoliated version of the Moog. The experiment lasts only a few moments, in an excerpt from Monteverdi's "Vespers for the Virgin Mary" (1610), but there it is, and the audacity of it all is sure to infuriate some listeners for whom synthesizer and sin are at the moment interchangeable terms.
But who is Walter Carlos, what is he, that all the record charts commend him? He is a boyishly slim 29-year-old physicist and musician who believes, as he puts it, that "the minute you're offered freedom you have to be free."

However, freedom does not mean chaos or a mindless break with the past, he wanted a visitor to know the other day as they listened to preview tapes of "The Well-Tempered Synthesizer in Carlos's one-room apartment on West End Avenue, a tiny place to which the word studio accurately applies, for a change. Crammed into the room are the machines that produced "S.O.B." and the new disk: a two - manual Moog synthesizer with additions and refinements of Carlos's own devising, eight track Ampex tape consoles, a polyphonic generator, a Dolby noise-reducing system, and intestinally convoluted mazes of wires and patch cords.

The chief point of all this equipment, however, is not to invent sounds that no human ear has ever heard before, Carlos says (although on the synthesizer that can be rather easily done). The machines give him the freedom to make music as he hears it in his head, and to do it alone, without help or hindrance. Being a rigorously trained classical musician, Carlos naturally hears music in the form of instruments and voices, and feels not in the least apologetic about such a traditional idea.

 

Any musical sound has to sound like an instrument or voice. What would you want it to sound like, a... ?" He struggled for a moment to find a word. Implicit in this argument, which some electronic musicians would call retrograde, is the idea that the sounds produced by voices and traditional instruments are not arbitrary but are the result of hundreds of years of experimentation and listening. Violin and piano makers, that is, did not produce their instruments in the expectation of inventing new sounds; the hope was to improve and expand what existing instruments already could do. Usually, the improvement was in the direction of matching the most flexible and remarkable instrument of all, the human voice.
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A year ago, when "S.O.B." was taking off, Carlos was afraid his work with the Moog would be misunderstood. "The idea of running out of new sounds seems to panic some composers," he said then. "I want to try to maintain a continuity in music- the synthesizer grows out of what went before, just as the piano grew out of the harpsichord." Like any instrument, the synthesizer is born dead and only comes to life under the hands of a musician.
It is therefore with the ut-most logic that Carlos, in his new album, experiments in vocal sounds. "It's still hard to get consonants," he said as he listened with a slight frown to the Monteverdi "Vespers" selection in which an exultant "Allelulia boomed out at the end. He waved a hand toward his synthesizer. "You still have to fight with the instrument to get musicality out of it. Sometimes I have to work two or three hours over one passage to get the lines to ritard at the same time."
There is a constant "struggle for imperfection" in working with the synthesizer, he pointed out because of the rigidities inherent in the machinery at present.
Using eight-tracks recording tape (his present limit) Carlos might, for example, lay down seven separate tracks of instrumental voices. But under them all, to guide the meter and rhythm he must first put down a "click track," a relentless device which, unless artfully varied will rob the music of life. Each instrumental track must be recorded separately, and the music thus grows by accretion like a crystal. Layer by layer, Handel's "Water Music" or a Scarlatti harpsichord sonata takes shape, until finally it is complete in all its geological striations, an eight-layer musical cake.
At every -instant of the process, which may take months if it is done properly, Carlos is busily plugging and unplugging patch cords, twisting dials and otherwise adjusting the quality of sound being synthesized.

"Each tone has to have a great many patches," he says, "so it won't sound simple and mechanical". He wants each tone, complex, so that it becomes a musical note rather than a lifeless bep. "I want the tone to do things inside. Every time I take a short cut I hate myself for it and have to do it over."
Carlos who was born (he pronounced it "barn," Yankee style-style) in Pawtucket R.I. began playing the piano at age 6, and naturally approaches the synthesizer from the keyboard viewpoint. But he is more than a virtuoso performer, having written a two-hour unpublished Opera, "Noah," as well as much other instrumental and electronic music. His variations for Flute and Electronic Sound and Dialogues for Piano and two loudspeakers have been recorded on Turn about.

Until success found him out, Carlos worked as a recording technician in a Manhattan studio. Now he is seriously considering forming his own company "to have the freedom to produce state-of-the-art records"- disk that would be made uncompromisingly, using the most advanced techniques known. He also wants to put out some of his own popular music- "maybe live strings and drums plus electronics" it only to show up some of the worse examples, now hitting the record market.
" I'm one of those classical composers who think they can write pop," he says. What does the classical Establishment think of his popular learning? He shrugs. "The Academy composers talk about music more than they do it. I don't want music to become frozen." He suddenly cocked his head toward the sounds coming from his loudspeakers: "That tone isn't quite bright enough as it decays, do you hear?
In 1967, Carlos and a friend, Rachel Elkind, formed their company, grandly titled it Trans-Electronic Music Productions, Inc. (because the initials, otherwise meaningless, spell TEMPI). Miss Elkind, a former Columbia employee, brought "Switched On Bach" to the record company as a finished product. They sold it for "a couple of hundred dollars" as an advance against royalties.
Now they have produced their second master for Columbia and have already begun to move toward goals. "I have a new 16-track tape recorder ordered from Ampex, and I can't wait to fool with it," Carlos said. He and Miss Elkind also are moving out of the cramped West End Avenue into a brownstone that they have bought and remodeled a few blocks farther up on the West.
The composer wants to get started on his "original thing", but the most immediate project is " a Christmas album - with voices."
Look out, Mormon Tabernacle Choir.