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Beauty in the Beast
Studio album by Wendy Carlos
Released	1986 (1986)
Genre	Classical electronic experimental
Length	57:41
Label	Audion Records
Producer	Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos chronology
Digital Moonscapes (1984) Beauty in the Beast (1986) Wendy Carlos: Secrets of Synthesis (1990)

Beauty in the Beast is a studio album from the American keyboardist and composer Wendy Carlos, released in 1986, on Audion Records, her first for a label other than Columbia Records since 1968. The album uses alternate musical tunings and scales, influenced by jazz and world music. On the back she includes a quote by Van Gogh: "I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it."

As the liner notes state, the entire album is synthesized, meaning that "All the music and sounds heard on this recording were directly digitally generated. This eliminates all the limitations of microphones, the weak link necessary in nearly all other digital recordings, including those that use 'sampling' technologies."

Track listing

Reviews

Dave Benson wrote:

It seems that for most users of synthesizers the extra freedom has not had much effect, in the sense that most music involving synthesizers is written using the equal tempered twelve tone scale. A notable exception is Wendy Carlos, who has composed a great deal of music for synthesizers using many different scales. particularly recommend Beauty in the Beast...(SYNCD 200, Audion, 1986, Passport Records, Inc.).

The music on this album cuts through a lot of the conventions and restraints that were used as frameworks for previous releases: instrumentation, tonality, and scaling, to name just a few

References

1. Carlos, Wendy (2000/1986). "Liner notes", Beauty in the Beast. ESD 81552.
2. Benson, Dave (2006). Music: A Mathematical Offering, p.207. ISBN 0-521-85387-7.
3. "Beauty in the Beast", AllMusic.com.

v t e Microtonal music
Composers	Richard Barrett Béla Bartók Easley Blackwood Jr. Heinz Bohlen Julián Carrillo Franklin Cox Mildred Couper John Eaton Brian Ferneyhough Michael Finnissy Bjørn Fongaard Alois Hába Christiaan Huygens Charles Ives Ben Johnston György Ligeti Stu Mackenzie Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf Joel Mandelbaum Joe Maneri Roger Redgate John Schneider Sevish Ezra Sims Nicola Vicentino Claude Vivier Elaine Walker Ivan Wyschnegradsky La Monte Young
Inventors	Glenn Branca Wendy Carlos Ivor Darreg Adriaan Fokker Lou Harrison Yuri Landman Harry Partch Tui St. George Tucker Nicola Vicentino
Tunings and scales	Non-octave- repeating scales Alpha scale Beta scale Gamma scale Delta scale Lambda scale (Bohlen–Pierce scale) Equal temperament 15 17 19 22 23 24 31 34 41 53 58 72 96 Just intonation Harry Partch's 43-tone scale Double diatonic
Concepts and techniques	Limit Otonality and Utonality Semitone Sonido 13 Xenharmonicity Tonality diamond
Groups and publications	Boston Microtonal Society Genesis of a Music Huygens-Fokker Foundation
Compositions	Beauty in the Beast quarter tone pieces just pieces Mother Sonata for Microtonal Piano Suite for Microtonal Piano Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media Flying Microtonal Banana K.G. L.W.
Other topics	Enharmonic keyboard Generalized keyboard Modernism (music)

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