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Bottom of the pile
20
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
3/100Critics
37/100Scholars
Author:
Amanda Sewell
Publisher:
Oxford University Press, USA
Date:
September 9, 2020
With her debut album Switched-On Bach, composer and electronic musician Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) brought the sound of the Moog synthesizer to a generation of listeners. Her story is not only one of a person who blazed new trails in electronic music for decades but also the story of a person who intersected in many ways with American popular culture, medicine, and social trends during the second half of the 20th century and well into the 21st.
What The Reviewers Say
The biography captures the freshness and ingenuity of the project [of Carlos's Switched-On Bach].
... the first serious book to examine Carlos’s legacy at length, both as a composer and as a transgender woman. It’s an essential read—not only for electronic music fans, but for anyone interested in the history of gender and popular culture.
... [a] fine new book.
... noteworthy in that it manages to be primarily about Carlos the composer, the musician, the vanguard of electronic music. While her gender identity is certainly written about in great length, it's never approached as a morbid curiosity. If anything, it's used primarily to chronicle the challenges Carlos encountered around society's preconceptions and prejudices toward transgendered people.
