This album is a recent discovery of mine, and is a true gem for fans of Bach, Synthesizers and music history. Released in 1968 by Columbia Records, it was the first album to utilize the then-new Moog synthesizer for anything other than spacey sound effects and avant-garde music. Instead, Carlos turned her attention to none other than Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the most recorded and performed classical composers in the history of Western music.

As is usually the case, the making of a masterpiece brings together many different elements and cross-currents in a specific moment in time. Drawing on various traditions and lineages, the ideas and stories of individuals, and not a small amount of luck, an album’s success is not easy to predict, but easier to explain and appreciate after the fact. In the case of Switched On Bach, a few pieces of the puzzle stand out. Robert Moog, the inventor of the theremin, had just created the first modular synthesizer in the late sixties and needed someone to make a serious, wide-reaching record using and demonstrating the instrument’s capabilities. Wendy Carlos, a composer and long-time electronic music researcher, was preparing her debut album and needed a way to express her musicality with the new technological methods she had been developing. Bach’s music was not yet discovered by young audiences of the time, and besides its potential appeal and popularity with the new generation of listeners it also proved to be a perfect match for the project for a simple technical reason: the new Moog was monophonic (able to play only one note or voice at a time), and Bach’s writing is almost always made up of single voices that act independently.

The album became wildly successful, winning three Grammy awards, selling over a million copies and cementing the synthesizer as a legitimate and versatile musical instrument. Carlos’ and Moog’s careers flourished: Carlos went on to compose and record soundtracks for such classic films as The Shining, A Clockwork Orange and Tron, and made several other classical albums using synthesizers; Moog further developed his instruments and expanded the technological output of his namesake company, still one of the best regarded and most recorded brands in analog synthesizers.

Here is a track from Switched On Bach - the D Minor Two Part Invention. Notice how more than two voices come into play here: Carlos uses the synthesizer to orchestrate the music and adds various “instruments” to play different notes and lines, sometimes enlarging and enriching a certain passage, and sometimes keeping it small and chamber-like with just two voices.

I wanted to have fun and try a version of my own, but unlike Carlos, I am playing live and using no overdubs, so no extra parts are added. What you see is what you hear: only two voices played together on two synthesizers - The Moog Little Phatty and Dave Smith Prophet Rev2. I hope you like listening to this version and that it sparks some inspiration for you to find musicality in whatever output you choose.