Switched-on Bach
| Switched-On Bach | ||||
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| Studio album by Wendy Carlos | ||||
| Released | October 1968 | |||
| Recorded | 1968 in New York City, New York, US | |||
| Genre | Electronic, classical | |||
| Length | 39:45 | |||
| Label | Columbia Masterworks | |||
| Producer | Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind | |||
| Wendy Carlos chronology | ||||
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| Allmusic |    |
Switched-On Bach is the first studio album by the American musician and composer Wendy Carlos, released under her birth name Walter Carlos 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 peaked on the US Billboard 200 chart at number 10 and topped its Classical Albums chart from 1969 to 1972. The album had sold over one million copies by June 1974 and in 1986 became the second classical album in history to be certified Platinum by the RIAA. 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.
Around 1967, Carlos asked Rachel Elkind to listen to several of Carlos' electronic compositions from ten years prior and those written with friend Benjamin Folkman from 1964 at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. One of the recordings was a rendition of Two-Part Invention in F major by Johann Sebastian Bach which she described as "charming". Soon after, Carlos began plans to produce an album featuring a selection of Bach pieces performed on a synthesizer, not in attempt to revive Bach's name, but with the intention of using the novel technology to make "appealing music you could really listen to", not "ugly" music being produced by avant-garde musicians around the same time. When the recording of Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major was completed, Elkind thought the track exceeded her "already high expectations" for the project, and was assigned as the album's producer. Elkind then contacted her friend, producer and conductor Ettore Stratta at Columbia Records, who "generously spread his enthusiasm throughout the rest of the company" and provided assistance in the making of the album, along with Paul Myers of Columbia Masterworks Records who granted Carlos, Folkman, and Elkind artistic freedom to record and release it.
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