[Walter]
(b Pawtucket, RI, 14 Nov 1939). Composer.
Beginning music study with piano lessons at age six, Carlos became one of the early experimenters in electronic music. Carlos, named Walter until after her gender transition in the 1970s, studied composition with Ron Nelson as an undergraduate at Brown University (AB 1962), then continued studies with Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Jack Beeson at Columbia University (MA 1965). From 1964 Carlos served as an adviser to Robert Moog in modifying and perfecting the Moog synthesizer. The synthesizer gained recognition as a musical instrument and became the standard for electronic realizations owing to the enormous popularity of Carlos’s recording Switched-on Bach (1968), which was made on a Moog synthesizer. More than a million copies of the album were sold, and this success spawned follow-up albums composed of other Baroque transcriptions for synthesizer, as well as many albums from other recording artists....