Johann Sebastian Bach, Wendy Carlos - Switched-On Bach
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Free Music Notes for Switched-On Bach
Free Music Review: I remember this from an LP in Elementary Sch. Still fantastic!!
Hit: 5 Stars
The scene is an Elementary School music classroom circa 1972. The teacher is telling the students about a new musical instrument called the Moog Synthesizer. It can make sounds and noises that could not be created before. One of the pioneers of this sound and instrument was Wendy Carlos, although I have to admit, I pictured the Bach guy on the cover behind the synth keyboard. The teacher then put the needle down on the LP and it took the students to a whole new level of music appreciation.
I'm not a musician or in a music related field of work. But this recording did for me exactly what my music teacher wanted it to. It grabbed my attention with the new strange sounds of the Moog while instilling some of the great classical music in my little mind.
Almost four decades later I happened upon this CD on Amazon. Would it still be good? Would it sound childish and immature like I was back then. Or would it be the mind opening sound I remembered?
Obviously, since I gave it five stars, it was the latter. The second I hit play and heard the first few bars, I was not only transported back to wonderful memories, but also opened to a new awareness that this music, in varied forms, had become part of my life. I recognized one song from a Disneyland Parade of Lights, another from a movie or commercial. It was a very cool RE-experience.
This recording has stood the test of time in my life and I have a feeling that I am not the only one who would experience this pleasant flashback. At first I switched off the last track which is Carlos explaining some of the processes and procedures she went through while finding just the right sounds for this album. After reveling in the music for a bit, I actually listened to the track and gained another increment of respect for this pioneer of music.
I highly recommend this disc not only as a piece of musical history and appreciation but as a collection of wonderful music!
Free Music Review: To Those Who Just Don't Get It.....
Hit: 5 Stars
After Bob Moog's death one week ago, I found myself listening to everything I have in my collection that was performed on a Moog synthesizer. This includes all of the Carlos stuff, all of Hans Wurmans's material (commercially released and otherwise) that I am lucky to have..it's harder to find..., and that of other artists and non-so-artistic performers. I even listened to my own opus from college electronic music lab and my own subsequent multi-track home studio work with my two MiniMoogs + MicroMoog.
In all of this, there is no way to get around the fact that the original Switched-On-Bach is the paramount of analog synthesizer performances known to me. I estimate that since a grade school music teacher first played the opening track for us when SOB first came out, and I begged my very reluctant, classically trained, serious-musician parents to buy me the LP, that I have listened to the album almost 2000 times.
I am a classical musician, recording engineer, and hear tons of music daily. I never get tired of J.S. Bach's music, and the amazing performances of Walter/Wendy Carlos do not wear thin. I have a pretty good idea of how Carlos put these tracks together, and why, and over what time period and under what conditions. I know how hard it is to pay Bach's complex music well, and I am very familiar with the huge difficulties in even approximating those performance values on multi-tracked synthesizer without MIDI, computer assistance, or sequencers. I also know that Carlos did this work at home using a very limited home-built multi-track recorder and mixer, on an instrument that was not at all refined, even for an early synth. And yet the music sings, and jumps out of the speakers, and dances and lives.
The work of others is simple organ playing by comparison. Carlos did the impossible, and the results are still marvelous today.
Free Music Review: VERY switched on and total joy!
Hit: 5 Stars
I was thrilled to see how many people like myself love this album & were introduced to it at an early age like I was. I believe the original release was in 1963 (?) and I remember as a kid I thought Walter Carlos was the guy on the cover of the album... so imagine my surprise when years later I see the same album cover with the performer listed as Wendy Carlos. Could it be the same album? Was I about to get really happy? YOU BET! I was so delighted to see this released on CD I can't even tell you. I loved this album and listened to it repeatedly as a kid. I especially love the pure, triumphant, unadulterated and unapologetic JOY of the first track, the Cantata... wow, turn THAT up in your car and just feel the tears of joy flood your eyes... well, maybe pull over if you are like me and can't see for that very same reason!
Bach is so very well suited to this medium- to hear each line like this and really have so much great color and definition-- I think Bach himself would be so very proud of Wendy's achievement. This album was such a landmark- I also was fascinated by the Tomita Planets (a synthesized version of the same composition by Gustav Holst) when I was younger- but this album will always have a special place in my heart. If you get it for only the very first track, it will be money well spent. Having said that, the whole album is just amazing- the Air on a G string is so reverent and peaceful. The inventions are all a trip! The one in F always cracks me up because that was one of the 1st pieces of his I tried to play... very tough because the hands do exactly the same thing- but 1 measure apart. Wendy's tempos are cookin' too, such virtuosity! But the love is there too on the slower movements where the time and care with the dynamics is so evident.
GREAT ALBUM, be glad it's on CD and get it! You won't regret it.
Free Music Review: Carlos: Bach's Electronic Brain
Hit: 5 Stars
SWITCHED ON BACH is the late 1960s oeuvre of Wendy Carlos that started it all: the electronic revolution introduced by one very great modern musician and composer. Here you will understand what Carlos once asserted, that Bach would have loved this because it lets us hear - for the first time ever - what Bach heard. Carlos theorizes that this is the 'way' Bach 'heard' the music for the first time in his head.
I know back in the 1970s in schools all over America, kids were listening to SWITCHED in school. Why? Because we were being taught what can be done with computers, and because in college in those days, there were not as many troglodytes as today.
Carlos has maintained this dream: lending a great, clear voice to Bach in a way no one has ever quite been able to match. These delightful pieces have only one 'weakness': Carlos did "break" the parts, meaning originally they are played throughout by the same instrument, thus being an unbroken voice. Carlos broke them to create the sense of an electronic orchestra.
Bach would no doubt have done the same, and would be writing for the synthesizer, if he were alive today. It can be jarring if you were raised and trained as I was, as we all were, pre-Carlos - hard to accept it at first listen.
Give Carlos a chance, listen with your Bach-infused heart, not with the silly old dusty teachings and prejudices. That kind of thinking nearly ruined every great composer from Bach to Varese!
Look up "Carlos Bach" under music and snatch all the albums you can - it's getting absurd how unavailable these classics are becoming. I fear it bodes ill for us all. GET THIS while you can, and don't forget there is a "sequel", and a year 2000 re-do!
Free Music Review: Bach, enhanced by Ms. Wendy Carlos
Hit: 5 Stars
One of the attractions of this CD is that it portrays the Moog synthesizer. Its main attraction, in my opinion, is the performance in which Ms. Wendy Carlos has revealed the cosmic aspect of Bach's music. The Moog synthesizer was used as a vehicle to achieve this goal. The enormous popularity of this recording no doubt lies in the fact that Ms. Carlos has taken the best of the Bach's music and amplified it. This music is an abstraction fitting our times. Ms. Carlos has catapulted Bach to space. One can hear the cosmic fireworks, see brilliant colors, the birth and death of the stars, feel the loneliness of the infinite stretches of space, and the ultimate power of the hope that we can conquer our own mortality. I think that this beautiful music is all about the human spirit. It is Bach at his best.
I fell in love with this recording almost three decades ago. I maintain that there is no nicer performance of Bach. The genius of Ms. Wendy Carlos sparkles. It makes me reflect on the human achievements. It is wonderful that she has produced something so great, and that so many people have benefited from her talent.
My favorites are Symphonia to Cantata #29, Prelude and Fugue #7 in E-Flat Major and Prelude and Fugue #2 in C Minor (both from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier), and also the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major.
The recording is enhanced and it has a delightful addition of about 8 minutes in which Ms. Wendy Carlos tells us about the early beginnings of this project. The CD comes with a very attractive booklet that is artistically designed and has several informative write-ups about the history and development of this project.
This recording is a must!