Editor Ira is here today with the history of an unlikely collaboration between Wendy Carlos and Weird Al.

If you had the good fortune to attend grade school in an era and region with at least marginal support for arts in the public school system, you probably remember "Peter and the Wolf." It's a 1936 classical music composition by Sergei Prokofiev that's as beloved by elementary school music teachers as it is be-loathed by elementary school music students. Or at least by me: As much as I usually embraced any excuse to watch cartoons in class, sitting through the 1946 Disney version year after year made me itch.

As an adult, I have to admit that "Peter and the Wolf" is an ingenious piece of musical education. If you need a refresher, Prokofiev establishes the tricky concept of listening to instrumental music as a narrative by making the connection explicit. Various instruments represent specific characters and their actions – Peter is represented by the strings, the wolf by French horns, Peter's cat by a clarinet, and so forth. This makes the listener envision the physical movements and emotional responses of an established cast of characters as the instruments weave their melodies. In hindsight, it's a lesson I draw from all the time, from the pacing and tone of my fiction writing to the mood-setting playlists I assemble for hosting trivia every week.

You sure couldn't have told me that when I was nine, though. Maybe if my music teacher had gotten her hands on the David Bowie narration I'd have felt differently, all due respect to original Disney narrator Sterling Holliday. In fact, looking through the hundreds of recordings that have been made over the years, there are a whole lot of options I might've preferred to the voice of Winnie the Pooh. Sir Alec Guinness and the Boston Pops, perhaps? Boris Karloff and the Vienna State Orchestra? Melissa Joan Hart (as Clarissa!) and the Boston Symphony Orchestra? Sean Connery? Kirstie Alley? Paul Hogan? Alice Cooper? Sharon Stone? Baseball hall-of-famer Tom Seaver, for reasons inconceivable?

But no, when I was nine, there was only one edition of "Peter and the Wolf" that would have made me a true believer, and it was just hitting the shelves. I'm speaking about the 1988 collaboration between electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and national treasure "Weird Al" Yankovic.

As odd a proposition as that may seem, it's actually a rather ideal marriage of artists and concept. The brainchild of some unknown executive at CBS Records, this "Peter and the Wolf" was envisioned as a loving parody of the original. It's still very much a classical piece, but Weird Al's narration gives him free rein to tinker with the details and create, in Al's words, a "pretty twisted" storyline. The cat is now named Louie and speaks like Peter Lorre. There's a new character named Bob the Janitor who's voiced by Al's accordion. There are side trips to Hollywood, gruesome deaths via stomach acid, and an unexpected moral about dental hygiene. In short, it's pretty much what you'd hope a Weird Al classical album would be.

The even more unorthodox side of the equation, though, came from Wendy Carlos, an artist never known for her orthodoxy. Carlos was an early aficionado of electronic music who worked with legendary inventor Robert Moog to develop his namesake synthesizer. Her 1968 "Switched-On Bach" record, which adapted famous pieces of classical music for the Moog, was a worldwide hit that won her three Grammy awards and spawned multiple sequels and imitators.

That album helped to popularize electronic music outside of music nerd circles and made Carlos a popular guest on TV talk and variety shows. In 1972 director Stanley Kubrick invited her to compose the celebrated score for "A Clockwork Orange." The pair collaborated again on "The Shining," but little of Carlos's music made it into the final film and things ended about as well as did most working relationships with Stanley Kubrick.

For all of that musical innovation, her biggest cultural impact came on a different stage. In a 1979 Playboy interview, Wendy Carlos became one of the first established celebrities to publicly come out as a trans person. Carlos said she had begun her transition in the late 1960s, had been living as a woman in her private life ever since, and was now ready to begin doing the same in public.

It was a nearly unprecedented action by an LGBTQ+ public figure, but it did nothing to break Wendy's stride. She worked prolifically throughout the '80s and '90s. She composed the score for the original "Tron," contributed soundtracks for films made by the United Nations Children's Fund, and created groundbreaking synth albums of classical music, pop hits, and original avant garde compositions.

Those albums included, of course, her Weird Al collab on "Peter and the Wolf." The notion of using a synthesizer to perform a piece specifically written as a showcase for a broad range of instruments is typical of Carlos's musical wit. So is her irreverent but respectful approach to Prokofiev's composition. In her words, "I had fun inserting innumerable additions and sly parodies of well known themes and ideas, from Bach to the age of TV, all woven insidiously into the Prokofiev orchestration as though they really belonged there."

The finished album, which also features a 26-minute original parody of "The Carnival of the Animals" by Camille Saint-Saëns and Ogden Nash (!), stands as one of the most playfully inventive of the many, many alternate takes on "Peter and the Wolf." Carlos and Yankovic perfectly compliment each other's sense of humor, musical adventurousness, and taste for weirdness. The record was a success if not a major hit. It earned a Grammy nomination for "Best Recording for Children," the last of Wendy's six career nominations and the fourth of Al's sixteen.

Sadly, "Peter & the Wolf/Carnival of the Animals – Part II" quickly fell out of the spotlight and has stayed there for decades. It's almost certainly the most obscure "Weird Al" Yankovic album to be released by a major label. Physical editions are long out of print and it's never been officially available on a streaming service. That's likely partly because Wendy Carlos is a fierce artists' rights activist with a long history of clashes with the mainstream music industry, which has made much of her canon difficult to find online. Whatever the reason, I hope you're able to track it down in some format. It's a singular piece of musical risk-taking that deserves a wider audience. I sure wish it had had the chance to make an impression on me back in third-grade music class.