At 85, Wendy Carlos remains an enigmatic figure in the world of classical music. Intensely private, she has not granted an interview request in over 15 years. When the first book-length treatment of her life and work was published in 2020— without her consent—Carlos trashed it on her personal website, calling it “mean-spirited” and “presumptuous,” adding that it “belongs on the fiction shelf.”
If you want to find Carlos’s music online, good luck: She refuses to release any of it in digital format. And if you post any of her songs illegally online you may just get a “takedown” order from her lawyer, who also happens to be her life partner. Federal court filings by the couple’s shared company, Serendip LLC, demonstrate continued vigilance against copyright infringement by her own fans on YouTube.
A Wendy Carlos playlist in 2025 therefore necessarily skirts around Carlos’s oeuvre. Rather, there is the music that she listened to and learned from, as well as the legacies of her breakthrough Grammy-winning album “Switched-On Bach,” which in 1969 became the best-selling classical music album of all time and stayed at the top of the Billboard classical music chart for an unprecedented three years.
Carlos is a pioneer of electronic music, particularly synthesizers, yet her contributions have long been misunderstood due to a heavy-handed focus on her “transformation” (in her words) as a transgender woman. Carlos’s career is noteworthy for more than her gender identity. It is in her technical innovations, namely the way that she trained computers to produce a rainbow of sounds, in faithful mimicry of the textures of the classical canon—from harpsichords to hundred-piece orchestras—that expanded the capabilities of keyboard music and ushered in the modern digital age.
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