Включённый Бах: Электронная музыка Венди Карлос

Switched On Bach is the debut album by American composer Wendy Carlos, originally released in October 1968 by Columbia Records. Produced by Carlos and Rachel Elkind, the album is a collection of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach performed by Carlos and Benjamin Folkman on a Moog synthesizer. It played a key role in bringing synthesizers to popular music, which had until then been mostly used in experimental music. Switched On Bach reached number 10 on the US Billboard 200 chart and topped the Billboard Classical Albums chart from 1969 to 1972. By June 1974, it had sold over one million copies, and in 1986 became the second classical album to be certified platinum. In 1970, it won Grammy Awards for Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist or Soloists (With or Without Orchestra), and Best Engineered Classical Recording. After Carlos came out as a transgender woman in 1979, reissues of Switched On Bach amended the artist credit to reflect her name, as was the case with the rest of her discography up to that point.

Around 1967, Carlos asked the musician Rachel Elkind to listen to her electronic compositions. They included compositions written ten years earlier, and some written from 1964 with her friend Benjamin Folkman at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. One recording was a rendition of Two Part Invention in F major by Johann Sebastian Bach, which Carlos described as "charming". Elkind was impressed with the recording of Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major and became the album's producer. Elkind contacted her friend, producer and conductor Ettore Stratta at Columbia Records, who "generously spread his enthusiasm throughout the rest of the company" and assisted in the album production. Paul Myers of Columbia Masterworks granted Carlos, Folkman, and Elkind artistic freedom to record and release it.

Switched On Bach features ten pieces by Bach available under the public domain, using a custom built 8 track recording machine constructed by Carlos from components built by Ampex. The initial track created, however, the Invention in F major, was recorded in the spring of 1967 on a Scully tape machine in Gotham Recording Studios at 2 West 46th Street, where Carlos had brought Moog equipment for a commercial project. According to Carlos, Switched On Bach took approximately five months and one thousand hours to produce. As the synthesizers were monophonic, meaning only one note can be played at a time, each track was assembled one at a time. Carlos said: "You had to release the note before you could make the next note start, which meant you had to play with a detached feeling on the keyboard, which was really very disturbing in making music." The synthesizer was unreliable and often went out of tune; Carlos recalled hitting it with a hammer prior to recording to obtain correct levels. After several notes were played, it was checked again to make sure it had not drifted.

Switched On Bach was released with two different covers. The most common features a man dressed as Bach standing before a Moog synthesizer. The first pressing featured the same man seated, as shown above. Carlos and Elkind objected to the original cover and had it replaced, finding it "was a clownish, trivializing image of a mugging Bach, supposedly hearing some absurd sound from his earphones". They also objected to the fact that the synthesizer was incorrectly set up: "[The earphones] were plugged into the input, not output, of a 914 filter module, which in turn was connected to nothing, [assuring] that silence is all that would have greeted Johann Sebastian's ears."

In 1968, shortly before the release of Switched On Bach, Robert Moog spoke at the annual Audio Engineering Society conference and played one of Carlos' recordings from the album. Moog recalled: "I walked off the stage and went to the back of the auditorium while people were listening, and I could feel it in the air. They were jumping out of their skins. These technical people were involved in so much flim flam, so much shoddy, opportunistic stuff, and here was something that was just impeccably done and had obvious musical content and was totally innovative. The tape got a standing ovation." Switched On Bach was released in October 1968. In 1969, it entered the top 40 on the US Billboard 200 before it reached a peak of No. 10 that year, for a total of 59 weeks on the chart. and it reached the seventh position of the Top 50 Albums chart of the Canadian magazine RPM. It reached Platinum certification in November 1986.

Switched On Bach was met with a negative response from some classical music traditionalists, but gained popularity among many younger listeners. In 1970, the album won three Grammy Awards: Best Classical Album, Best Classical Performance – Instrumental Soloist or Soloists (With or Without Orchestra), and Best Engineered Classical Recording.

Following the album's success, Moog received requests from producers and artists for his synthesizers. A number of other Moog synthesizer albums were released, such as Switched On Rock by the Moog Machine, Music to Moog By by Gershon Kingsley, and The Moog Strikes Bach by Hans Wurman. Moog credited the album for demonstrating that synthesizers could be used for more than avant garde music and sound effects. He said of the album's success: The producer Giorgio Moroder credits the album for bringing synthesizers to his attention. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys called it "one of the most electrifying albums I ever heard." It was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2005.

Switched On Bach was remastered and included as part of the Switched On Boxed Set, a four CD box set released in 1999 with The Well Tempered Synthesizer, Switched On Bach II, and Switched On Brandenburgs. In 2001, a remastered edition of Switched On Bach was released with a previously unreleased track, "Initial Experiments, demonstration". Carlos wrote: "You may rest assured that this is the best these recordings have ever sounded." In 1992, Carlos also released Switched On Bach 2000 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of her first album, featuring a re recording of the record using digital synthesizers and computer assisted recording with an added introductory composition styled as a birthday fanfare for the project.