''Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange'' is a studio album by American musician and composer

Wendy Carlos Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos, November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores. Born and raised in Rhode Island, Carlos studied physics and music at Brown University before moving ...

, released under her birth name Walter, in 1972 by

Columbia Records Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. It was founded on January 15, 1889, evolving from the A ...

. The album contains previously unreleased and complete tracks from her score to

Stanley Kubrick Stanley Kubrick (; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films, almost all of which are adaptations of nove ...

's 1971 film ''

A Clockwork Orange ''A Clockwork Orange'' may refer to: * ''A Clockwork Orange'' (novel), a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess ** ''A Clockwork Orange'' (film), a 1971 film directed by Stanley Kubrick based on the novel *** ''A Clockwork Orange'' (soundtrack), the film ...

'' that had been cut or omitted from the official soundtrack, '' Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange'', released three months earlier. In April 2000, the album was reissued with bonus tracks under a new title, ''A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score''.

Background

The album includes the complete version of Carlos's composition "Timesteps", originally intended as a lead-in to an electronic arrangement of the fourth movement to Symphony No. 9 by

Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classic ...

. Carlos had written the opening to "Timesteps" prior to working on the film. She picked up the same-titled novel and noticed that the piece reflected the feeling of the first few chapters. Thereafter the piece developed into "an autonomous composition with an uncanny affinity for 'clockwork'" (the last word being Carlos's way of referring to the book). Among the instruments Carlos used for the score include a "spectrum follower", a prototype of a

vocoder A vocoder (, a portmanteau of ''voice'' and ''encoder'') is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation. The vocoder ...

that converted the human voice into electronic signals that mirror the original note that has been played. Since the Ninth Symphony has a chorale section in the finale, Carlos felt it was an appropriate challenge for the new device. When the film version was announced Carlos and producer

Rachel Elkind Rachel Elkind (born February 23, 1939) is an American classical musician, record producer and composer. She produced the work of Wendy Carlos, most notably the bestselling 1968 album '' Switched-On Bach''. Elkind grew up in San Francisco. She mo ...

made a demonstration recording for Kubrick, who became interested and invited them to meet him in London. The outcome was not entirely satisfying to Carlos in terms of total contribution to the film, but there remained the opportunity to present the music in a separate album, which led to this collection.

Artwork

The record label did not attempt to use images from the movie on the

album cover An album cover (also referred to as album art) is the front packaging art of a commercially released studio album or other audio recordings. The term can refer to either the printed paperboard covers typically used to package sets of and 78-r ...

. The image chosen was a surrealistic

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an Assemblage (art), assemblage of different forms, thus creat ...

of objects and images representing ideas in the film by visual artist Karenlee Grant. These included a rifle, an image of Beethoven inside the numeral "9", various mechanical images including a clockwork mechanism superimposed on a sliced orange, dancers representing the classical themes, and so on. This again was not entirely to Carlos' and Elkind's liking. For the CD re-release, an image parodying the film's own logo was created and used on the cover—depicting

holding out a glass of drugged milk through the film poster's iconic "A"-shaped image—with the original cover image on the back cover of the included booklet.

Track listing

Original release (LP) (1972)

The original release contains the following tracks:Columbia Records KC 31480, 1972 ;Side 1 ;Side 2

CD release (2000)

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score 1972 albums 1970s classical albums Wendy Carlos soundtracks Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score Albums produced by Rachel Elkind