Peter Zinovieff - A Tribute

Welcome to the Sound On Sound electronic music podcast channel. I'm James Gardner, and in this episode I'll be commemorating the work of the electronic music pioneer Peter Zinoviev, who died just over a year ago at the age of 88. Peter was very interested in Pushing what's really possible of the instrument of me as a human being and also of the computer He was always pressing the sort of limits of what was possible to be done with computers For many sound on sound readers, Peter Zinoviev's primary association is with the range of analog synthesizers produced by EMS, the company he co founded in 1969. But I think it's more accurate to view him as an animateur, composer, and sonic collaborator than as a synth designer. Back in the 60s and 70s, he had many creative and fruitful associations with people such as Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, Alan Sutcliffe, Justin Connolly, Hans Werner Henser, and the late Harrison Birdwhistell. In the remarkable creative resurgence in the later part of his life, his collaborators included the poet Katrina Porteous, violinist Aisha Cellist Lucy Railton, and his granddaughter, the singer Anna Papadimitriou. Zinoviev wasn't one to peer nostalgically through rose tinted glasses at his computer music from the 1960s, though. His eyes were resolutely on the present and future. One of his late works, South Pacific Migration Party, was presented in a 28 channel ambisonic version in 2017. This computer generated piece was derived from the hydrophone recording of a single blue whale song captured by the oceanographer Susanna Buchan off the coast of Chile. The piece, reduced to stereo for CD, is playing behind me now, and we're grateful to Andrew Spirou of the Association for Depth Sound Recordings label for allowing us to use this excerpt in the podcast. Peter Zinoviev set up an electronic music studio in his home during 1962. He had lessons in basic tape manipulation techniques from Daphne Oram towards the end of that year, but quickly became frustrated with tape editing as a way of making music. His interests in producing sequences of pitches without recourse to razor blades and splicing tape led him to build a sort of sequencer that used post office uniselectors to choose pitches from a bank of oscillators. But this proved noisy and cumbersome. By 1966, Peter and family had moved into a house at 49 Deodar Road, Putney, and the studio equipment went into a purpose built structure in the garden, which backed onto the River Thames. By now, Peter Zinoviev was getting more seriously involved with electronic music, and he entered into a loose creative and commercial partnership with Delia Darbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, under the group name, Unit Delta plus Peter's interest in controlled randomness and probability took him beyond his own engineering skills as he recalled. When Gordon Reed interviewed him for Sound on Sound in 2016, I tried to find people to build me sequences, which I knew was the most important thing of all. So. I got Mark Dowson to build me a transistor sequencer. This was, for me, a gigantic step. Dowson's device allowed the independent setting of the pitch, volume, and duration of 32 different steps. The actual order in which these were played was usually random, but the probability of each step occurring was independently controllable. Zinoviev used this stochastic tone generator in his Taran Teller from 1966, which is playing behind me now, and which appears, by kind permission, of Jenny Zinoviev. The stochastic tone generator turned out to be an intermediate technology. The hundreds of controls that festooned its front panel proved unwieldy, and Zinoviev's compositional ambitions soon exceeded its capabilities. He wanted to take the concept a step further and define more complex rules to control the order in which notes occurred. Dawson realized that what Zinoviev needed was a was a digital computer, and suggested he buy a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 8, one of a new generation of relatively small, comparatively inexpensive machines. And by comparatively inexpensive, I mean 4, 000 pounds. But in mid 1967, thanks to the sale of his wife's tiara, Zinoviev acquired a PDP 8S computer, which acted as a sort of super sequencer. It was probably the first computer in a private house in Britain. By the time the PDP 8 arrived, Dowson had left to work for the cybernetician Gordon Pask, but he recommended David Cockrell, an old school friend, as his successor. And so began another of Zinoviev's fruitful collaborations. David Cockrell was the real, real genius in electronic music device making. ZINOVIEV. COM So he made me voltage controlled oscillators and amplifiers and envelope generators. He also built a bank of 64 filters which could analyze any sound going in and give a spectrum of a sound which could then be replayed by making those same filters oscillators. While Cockerell and Zinoviev were mostly occupied with a computer studio, a request towards the end of 1968 from the Australian composer Don Banks for a low budget electronic music device diverted David and Peter to design and make the Don Banks music box, of which three were eventually made. Cockerell, Zinoviev, and their colleague Tristram Carey, already known for his electronic music, could see a gap in the market, and were sufficiently encouraged to make a more sophisticated commercial version. We thought if we made a small electronic music studio, self contained studio, then that might sell. So, together we designed the VCS 3. That was Tristram Carey who made the box, David Cockerell the inside, and I designed the concept of what modules should be there. Zinoviev, Cockerell and Carey set up the company Electronic Music Studios London Ltd, or EMS, and produced the VCS 3, Europe's first commercially produced synthesizer, in November 1969. Thanks to its relatively low cost, its flexible matrix patching system and its versatility, the instrument proved successful, and EMS went on to produce a keyboard, the DK 1 or Cricklewood, for the VCS 3 a few months later. In March 1971, the Synthi range was introduced, which included the Synthi A, the suitcase version of the VCS 3, and the huge Synthi 100, one of which went to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Robin Wood has been with EMS almost from the beginning. He joined the company in 1970, 1995, and still builds SynthiAs to order, with a waiting list much longer than Morgan's. I started with 17, nearly 18. I used to hoover up and do odd jobs, so I've gone right through it progressively from then. The connection with EMS was that I went to school with the brother of Victoria, Peter's wife. That was the connection that got me into it. I met Peter for the first time on this island, Rase, which is between the Isle of Skye and the mainland of Scotland. And that was in the summer of 1970. I asked Robin about Peter's role at EMS. Peter was just the genius centre of energy in the company. He was mercurial, you know, he was a charming man, very creative, and he just had the ability to organise people around him. And how did Peter organise David Cockrell and the other engineers who worked for EMS? He gave them the jobs that they needed to do. David was really the sort of chief designer. And David was chiefly engaged in sorting Peter's studio. He spent a lot of time doing these sort of one off, you know, like the oscillator bank that Peter had in the studio. At the start, it was just David working from his home in Cricklewood. That's why the keyboard's called the Cricklewood. It's called the Cricklewood. And then more engineers joined, and there's a service engineer, Terry Ralph Knight. David was in charge of sub delegating the design work to the other engineers. Tim Orr designed things like the Synthie E and the Vocoders. Richard Monkhouse designed the video synthesizer. Peter Easty, he was involved with the studio side as well with David, you know, the digital oscillator bank. But um, as I said before, Peter didn't, he wasn't on people's backs the whole time. He would sort of just review what was going on from time to time. It was all terribly relaxed. And, uh, easy going. But, he knew what he wanted. He gave people the tasks that he wanted them to do. And left them to go off and do it. I asked Robin what tasks he was given. I was in charge of keeping Peter's studio looking tidy. I used to do hoovering, then there would be projects that he wanted built for his studio. Peter didn't like pop music, and of course I did. I was very into acid rock, American bands, European electronic music. Steve Hillidge used to come to the shop quite a lot, you know, Tim Blake, you know, so Gong. from quite an early time. They, they were favorites of ours. And I used to work with someone else called Billo Kentish. So we were the boys, you know. And we had this job of, um, making a terminal that would be in the listening room, like a monitoring room. So we'd have, we'd have odd little projects. And then I would get sent off driving. I had, I was a driver as well. And in those days, if you wanted to send something from the factory up to Putney, it had to come by rail. So I would go off to the Red Star office to collect parcels from the factory. I'd also go up to Cricklewood. There might be an appointment for a demonstration. That was really, I think, why I was chosen. brought in. Peter didn't like demonstrating the equipment, so he wanted someone who could take all that work off him. So I learned how to use the VCS3 and Synthia, and then I would give my funny little demonstrations to people who would come by Putney, and some of them were rather sort of amazing people, you know, like Don Preston and Ian Underwood from Frank Zappa's band. There were all sorts of people. I mean, David Gilmore from Pink Floyd, he would come round, usually just to collect something. And of course, I also did trade fairs where you met loads of people. So all in all it was a wonderful experience of meeting people in the business. For Peter Zinoviev, dealing with the business was a necessary evil. Visits to trade fairs and to the EMS factory in Dorset were tedious irritations that took time away from what he saw as his main work in the computer studio. From the mid 1970s, EMS had a separate office cum showroom of sorts in Putney Bridge Road, but before that, the studio and business both operated from the Zinoviev family home. I asked Sofka Zinoviev, Peter's eldest daughter and now an accomplished author, what it was like to grow up in a house with a computer music studio. When I was a child, it felt completely normal that there was a computer, music studio, in a shed, in the garden, right by the river, by Putney Bridge. But looking back on it, I can see that that actually was quite a strange environment. For me, it was normal to sit in the kitchen having a snack or something, and various people would troop in through the front door, go down the stairs into the studio, we would hear as children spoke. Orcs and bleeps and all sorts of things going on, but we just thought, well, that's That's life. I'd say that Peter was very good at involving work life, family life, and all sorts of life. There were no boundaries, really, as most people have between work and home, so it all went on at Same time, and we were perfectly allowed to wander into the studio and see what people were doing. And equally, visitors who often became friends would be brought into our lives. So we would be all sitting in the kitchen having lunch together, or they would be brought up to Scotland on holiday. Peter Zov fell in love with the Hebridean Island of Raza when he first journeyed there in the 1950s to do field work for his DFI in geology. The family later owned two Crofters cottages on the island and would holiday there three times a year. Peter's friend and collaborator, Harrison and Bertus also lived on Raza in the 1970s. And the place figures prominently in EMS folklore. It became a kind of works holiday tradition almost that throughout the years you'd be sent to Raza to have the most fantastic holiday with Peter. And, um. We'd get up to all sorts of amazing expeditions, and then at the end of that, you'd go back to Putney and Peter would stay in Rase for the rest of the summer. So then you had a different kind of holiday back in Putney, because Peter wasn't there to make sure you were doing useful work, you know. Rase was the location for EMS's well known Every Picnic Needs a Synthie advert, which featured some of the island's inhabitants alongside the Zinoviev family and friends. This was typical of Peter's knack of involving innocent bystanders in EMS activities. Sofka and her brothers, Leo and Kolinka, also appeared in other EMS adverts, including Every Opera Needs a Synthie from 1973. With the connection between family and studio, it was completely normal for us to be called on the spur of the moment to come and join in something, whatever that was, whether it was some sort of making music or be told to, in our pajamas, come down for a photographic session. I was given my mother's white nightdress to put on, much too big, given a glass of champagne, my brothers were in their pyjamas at various synthesizers, and it was just all part of a normal day for Zinoviev children. More than 50 years after their introduction, the EMS VCS3 and Synthi A were are firmly established in the vintage synthesizer pantheon, sought after by collectors and prized by sound designers. Robin Wood has worked with these machines for half a century and still makes them. So just what is it that makes yesterday's synthies so different, so appealing? Well, I think it's because of the open architecture of the design. The synthie, you could plug a keyboard into it. But it also had the potential to process sound as well as generating off the wall electronic noises. It offered more potential, I guess, than the other instruments that were on offer. Over the years, that reservoir of potential, people are still discovering great things that you can do with them that haven't been done before. So it's a wonderful sort of Pandora's box of creativity. It's like a sort of chemistry set for sound. The Matrix allows you to interconnect everything to everything else in every conceivable way. Loads of those possibilities are sort of meaningless and don't do anything. But there are very, very many that do create odd little deviations that lead you into a wonderful land of discovery. Of course, virtual and physical copies of EMS synthesizers are now readily available. Some are simply clones of the original, but others, such as EricaSynth's Syntrex, draw on and update EMS designs without literally copying them. Peter was given the Syntrex, and he asked me to have a look at it and see what I thought of it. And I think they did a nice job. They obviously put a lot of effort into having this recallable matrix system and redesigning all the basic hardware. For myself, I generally am not very pleased to see all the people that have copied the EMS stuff. Because it's the way I make my living. So it's kind of natural that I sort of view it with raised eyebrows, you know. Oh God, here's another one. Peter's interest was not in the synthesizers. Has to be said he didn't like demonstrating them. He didn't really recognize how wonderful they were For people to be able to explore these realms of sound because he was streets ahead you know wanting to go into the computer controlled sounds and analyzing natural sounds and bending those sounds around So, it was all slightly tedious to him, right through his life, he was always pressing at the sort of limits of what was possible to be done with computers. Back in 1969, Zinoviev speculated that the computer could be programmed to recognize concepts like catharsis, tension, and expectation, and somehow render them sonically. Even with current AI, we're not quite there yet, and certainly Zinoviev's notion was impossibly ambitious at a time when thousands of lines of code had to be laboriously entered via teletype in order to control relatively crude analogue devices. At that point, direct waveform synthesis was still in its infancy, and pioneers like Jean Claude Risse and John Chowning had to wait for 24 hours or more before hearing their code rendered in sound. While Zinoviev did collaborate with composers such as Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henser during the 1970s, his own compositional activity took a back seat, partly because trying to maintain a computer studio and run a synthesizer business took up so much of his energies. He did not like running the business. He was an anti managing director type, really. It eventually all sort of caught up with him, and EMS went bust. After the collapse of EMS and the studio in 1979, Zinoviev worked on a computerized player piano project for Clive Sinclair and taught courses on acoustics at Cambridge University in the mid 80s. It was not until the new millennium that domestic computer technology enabled Zinoviev to at least approach some of the sonic manipulations he'd dreamed of in the 1960s. There was a long gap in Peter's life, and it's really between the end of EMS, when he finished working with Harry Burt, was when Mask of Orpheus, really, he didn't do creative work until well into the next millennium. And what was incredible was how he came out of that and had this Indian summer of creativity, which was as powerful as anything he'd ever done. In 2010, I got a commission to write a piece of music for an amazing sculpture in Istanbul, which was a sort of girder like sculpture with 40 loudspeakers. So I could write for 40 channels, which would then be grouped into six or so rooms, as it were, in this structure called the Morning Line. And so that was an amazing commission by TBA 21 in Vienna. And that got me going. I wrote a piece called Bridges From Somewhere and Another To Somewhere Else. The bridges from somewhere were my past in electronic music. And since then, I've just been continuously writing music all the time and progressing with amazing techniques which are available. While Zinoviev was enthusiastic about the capabilities of relatively accessible 21st century music software, his frustrations with the limitations of computers hadn't gone away. But he did find a new generation of live performers with whom he could collaborate. You can't put your hands in the computer and squeeze and touch. You're limited by rather terrible interfaces. Whether it's a Basquiat keyboard, whether it's a mouse, whether it's a pianistic type keyboard, or whether it's touchpads, you're very limited of how you can physically, as a person, control the sounds to come out. There's nothing like the subtlety of a person who plays an instrument. I love working with musicians. Sometimes I've worked with Aisha Now I'm working with Lucy Railton on a cello concerto. RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer is a piece that Peter and I started in 2014. We met at the London Contemporary Music Festival that year when he was performing there with the violinist Aisha Razbeba. And I was working at the festival at that time. I had probably imagined that he'd be more involved with the analogue world, but Peter didn't really spend much time looking at the past when we worked together. He was really interested in how things were developing, I think he was always looking at how to do something unconventional even with the restraints of the software he was using. He was always upgrading and getting new bits of equipment and um, it was very contemporary. It was not at all an old school way of working. It was really inspiring to work with him during that period. I asked Lucy Railton how she and Peter started work on the piece RFG. I think we realised that. There is plenty of sonic material that I was really interested in with the cello, with extended techniques. Improvisation, basically. That was actually a really interesting starting point for both of us. So we didn't start using scores. We looked at objects and ideas to begin with and from those ideas and objects I improvised short sketches basically. We recorded those at his house in Cambridge and I used to go and visit and we slowly sort of work on what structure might look like first. It was important that all the material had a very meaningful connected starting point to both of us. In that way, Peter and I assembled various objects and used them as a visual cue for an improvisation. I'd say most of our time working together was spent kind of decoding each other's techniques and trying to understand each other's techniques, so he would often ask me to do things that were Physically impossible, often like a very interesting kind of task and challenge because inevitably I'd end up trying to find a solution or workarounds to the demand. And a lot of the time it was about failing with those ideas. And that was never really an issue, of course. It was just a way of working together so that there was always this challenge. He certainly gave me a lot of instruction at the beginning, but ultimately allowed me to finish the work in the way I wanted to. And in the end, we would recall all of these experiments. And he would then use that material and make what he called the orchestral part, which is the electronic part that we hear in the record. So everything you really hear is coming from these initial improvisations that we kind of thought about. And I've recorded with him in Cambridge, the transformed material makes up this orchestral part. And then on top of that, I wrote these solo cello parts, but very much in collaboration with Peter. I mean, I'd send him little sketches, and I'd be in Berlin, he'd be in Cambridge, and we'd send files back and forth with each other, and we kind of really pieced it all together, quite slowly over a long period of time. With any collaboration, there's always these Difficult moments and those were normally the times when we made the most progress or did some of the most interesting work. I'd always been improvising and experimenting with my own music making methods with production and electronic music. But I still definitely had limits, physical limits, and the instrument also has limitations. So we, we started then to look at modifying the cello. And one of the performances we did, Peter asked me, how can we make this even more challenging for you? I said, well, I could take the cello to pieces and then put it together on stage, if you like. And that's what we did. Um, it actually came from. A kind of accidental moment in a concert that we did in Den Bosch, FAQ Festival, where the cello fell apart during the performance. He thought that was exciting and I did too. I mean, it was definitely not what we were expecting to happen. Definitely created something tense and something fascinating for Peter. He actually really enjoyed that. He was very proud that we managed to finish something and it'd be released in such a great way. by Pan Records and by ZKM. We're really really happy with the results. What we hear on the recording is a version of our work together. Obviously it had to be finalized so it could be ready for release as an album, but after that point the piece kept developing. Peter wanted to then, in performance, throw in other elements of trance. So he wanted to create that. kind of game method where we'd have some kind of trance procedure, which would tell me which movement, which section of the piece I was going to play, but it would happen immediately on the spot. Sadly, we never got to try that out, but it was just, you know, that's just one example of the ways in which he just continued to work on things. We were lucky. I mean, it was very much a friendship as much as it was a collaboration. That's why this recording and what we create is, is very special. It's a Zeph sort of. 50 years have gone and now I'm beginning to be able to do it. I mean, it is like that. Right up until when he died, he was active and making things and collaborating and inspiring people, and that makes me very happy. Fading out behind me is RFG, Inventions for Cello and Computer, by Peter Zinoviev and Lucy Railton. Our thanks to Bill Kuligas of Pan Records for allowing us to use this recording. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts website page where you can explore what's playing on our other channels. This has been a James Gardner production for sound on sound magazine.