Wendy Carlos

Beauty In the Beast (1986/2000) ...

"I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it." Van Gogh.

Wendy Carlos is a composer and theorist, best known for Switched On Bach & A Clockwork Orange soundtrack.  Here, she shows her interests in alternate tunings (just intonation, Balinese) applied to synthesiser works ...

BeautyInTheBeast ...
The title cut of the album, this compact piece whimsically blends two quasi grotesque ideas with a romantic theme in best "Ballet Russe" style. The new scales used for all of this are quite odd the first heard called Beta, splits the perfect fourth into two equal parts (actually eight equal steps of nearly 64 cents each ), the second, Alpha, does the same to the minor third (four equal steps for 78 c. each). While both scales have nearly perfect triads two remarkable coincidences!), neither can build a standard diatonic scale, and so the melodic motion is strange and exotic. The two forces, beast and beauty, shift back and forth, and things are never quite what they seem... wendycarlos.com ...

Listen ...

As Benson writes, though, "it seems that for most users of synthesizers the extra freedom has not had much effect, in the sense that most music involving synthesizers is written using the equal tempered twelve tone scale. A notable exception is Wendy Carlos, who has composed a great deal of music for synthesizers using many different scales. [Benson] particularly recommend[s] Beauty in the Beast...

"The music on this album cuts through a lot of the conventions and restraints that were used as frameworks for previous releases: instrumentation, tonality, and scaling, to name just a few." (Dave Benson, 'Music: a Mathematical Offering')