By:
On:
In: On Music
Tagged: ,

Continuing my exploration of queerness in music for this Pride Month, I turn to composer Wendy Carlos, a great transgender artist who is a notable late-20th century pioneer in electronic music. Carlos was born in 1939 as Walter Carlos, but after first experiencing gender dysphoria as a five-year-old, Carlos eventually underwent sex-reassignment surgery in the early 1970s. In addition to her work in electronic music, Carlos also composed the scores for several notable films: Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and the Disney “world inside the computer” classic TRON. TRON was one of my first sources of exposure to electronic music. From theDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: On Music
Tagged: ,

Today begins Pride Month, so let’s listen to some Tchaikovsky. It is not actually conclusively known if Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was gay or not, but most biographers and historians have concluded, from the nature and the durations of the various relationships in his life, that he was. Sadly, late 19th-century Imperial Russia was not a good time for being homosexual, and it’s certainly known that Tchaikovsky, for all his artistic success, struggled for all of his 53 years through a life full of melancholy, loneliness, and outright depression. He married once, and it was a calamity that was annulled within justDown the rabbit hole….