US musician and composer Wendy Carlos, whose pioneering 1968 debut album Switched-On Bach helped popularise Moog synthesizer music, is the subject of a new biography by Amanda Sewell. As a composer Carlos joined the dots between American popular culture, medicine and social trends of the 20th and 21st century. Her identity as a transgender woman shaped much of her life and career, as well as how audiences received her work.

Carlos received her MA in music from Columbia University where she studied with the electronics pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. She followed Switched-On Bach with The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, and an electronic score complete with vocodered voices for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Her extensive works include further electronic explorations of classical music, soundtracks for Disney’s Tron and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, among others, and more. In 2005 she was presented with the SEAMUS lifetime achievement award by the Society of Electro Acoustic Music in the United States.

Author Amanda Sewell is music director at Interlochen Public Radio in North Michigan. Her first book Wendy Carlos: A Biography will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2020 in the US and May 2020 in the UK. It is available to pre-order now.