Wendy Carlos

Carlos earned degrees in both music and physics from Brown University and Columbia, a dual background that led her directly into early collaboration with Moog synthesizer inventor Robert Moog, whose instruments she helped refine and popularize years before most musicians had ever seen one. That technical fluency with a brand-new instrument gave her a head start no conventionally trained composer had.

An electronic music pioneer, her Moog realizations of Beethoven and Purcell gave A Clockwork Orange its icy, ironic soul, and she later scored TRON as well. She had already achieved substantial crossover fame with the bestselling classical-synthesizer album Switched-On Bach, which won multiple Grammy Awards and helped introduce the synthesizer to a mainstream audience, before Kubrick recruited her for the film.

She came out publicly as a transgender woman in 1979, becoming one of the first prominent musicians to do so at a time when it carried significant professional and personal risk, and has continued to be recognized as a foundational figure in the history of electronic music composition.