Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach

by Roshanak Kheshti

So much, popular and scholarly, has been written about the synthesizer, Bob Moog and his brand-name instrument, and even Wendy Carlos, the musician who made this instrument famous. No one, however, has examined the importance of spy technology, the Cold War and Carlos’s gender to this critically important innovation.

Through a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology studies, Roshanak Kheshti engages in a reading of Carlos’s music within this gendered context. By focusing on Switched-On Bach (the highest selling classical music recording of all time), this book explores the significance of gender to the album’s–and, as a result, the Moog synthesizer’s–phenomenal success.

Paperback | 120 pages | Bloomsbury Publishing | 2019

Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego, USA. Her first book Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (2015) is an examination of the form of listening promoted by the US world music culture industry through which the modern listening subject is produced. Her research broadly centers on the consumption of race, gender and sexuality through sound and film. Her scholarship has appeared in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Anthropology News, Parallax, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!. She has also published numerous musical recordings both as a former member of bay area-based experimental rock band The Ebb and Flow and independently as composer and performer for independent film.