Biography

Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind composed and performed a brief electronic score for Stanley Kubrick's horror film "The Shining", including one major theme in addition to a main title based on Hector Berlioz's interpretation of the "Dies Irae", used in his "Symphonie Fantastique", as well as pieces of modernist music. Carlos and Elkind had composed a great deal of music for the film, however, Kubrick decided to go with classical music from other sources, as he had done on previous occasions. Some of Carlos' unused music appears on her album "Rediscovering Lost Scores, Vol. 2".

Carlos' musical education began when she started playing the piano at the age of six. Her formal education included Brown University (where she studied music & physics) & Columbia University (where she earned an MA in music). At Columbia, Carlos was a student of Vladimir Ussachevsky, a pioneer in electronic music. After graduation, she met Robert Moog and was one of his earliest customers, providing feedback for his further development of the Moog synthesizer. Around 1966, Carlos met Rachel in New York City, USA, who produced her early albums, such as "Switched on Bach".

Wendy Carlos write about Rachel Elkind: "When I met Rachel, she was working at a recording studio in New York City. She had worked closely as the secretary to Goddard Lieberson of Columbia Records. She'd also been an active performing artist, a singer of jazz and show music, and some classical background, too. I love her wide-range, mellow, flexible voice. But being rather shy, she was never fully comfortable in the spotlight herself, and chose to do what in Hollywood would be termed: "going behind the camera". It wasn't until the Winter movement of Sonic Seasonings that she finally relented and recorded that haunting vocalise many of you have commented on so favorably. Just prior to that, in the Beethoven Ninth last movement we realized with our early vocoder you can hear her spirited articulations on the "singing synths". But Winter was Rachel's natural voice, whirled around the stereospace. There were several other unique performances she recorded during the '70s, including one that gives the "sizzle" to the opening title music to Kubrick's The Shining. Rachel, who came to NYC from San Francisco with hopes to be a jazz singer, brought a important quality of spontaneity to my music, and helped me to shed some of the stuffier conceits one can acquire from formal music studies in Ye Olde Ivy League."

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