why can't I?

‏¹ With the appearance of Switched on Bach in the fall of 1968, its creator, Walter Carlos, became an instant celebrity and the album became the best selling classical record of all time. Carlos has continued his unique work in electronic music with a second record, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, and, now, music for Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange.

Since his early youth, Carlos (born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1939) displayed a strong interest in both music and scientific technology: at the precocious age of 10 he composed a Trio for Clarinet, Accordion and Piano, and four years later constructed a small computer. When he was 17 years old he assembled an electronic music studio and produced his first electronic composition which utilized sounds created and manipulated on tape recorders. As a student at Brown University (1958-1962), Carlos studied music and physics and taught electronic music at informal sessions; later at Columbia University (1962-1965), he did extensive work at the Columbia-Princeton electronic music center. During that period, Carlos assisted Leonard Bernstein in a concert of electronic music at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, and also saw two of his scores, Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers and Variations for Flute and Electronic Sound, commercially recorded.

Intending to develop an electronic sound producer which could validly be termed a musical instrument, Carlos began a collaboration with engineer Robert Moog in 1966. The result was a prototype of Carlos' special synthesizer on which he performed and recorded his realizations of Bach and other composers and his music for A Clockwork Orange.