Peter Zinovieff
In the late 1960s, his company, Electronic Music Studios (EMS), made the VCS3, a synthesizer used by many early progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd[3] and White Noise, and Krautrock groups[4] as well as more pop-orientated artists, including Todd Rundgren and David Bowie.
[9] Zinovieff's work followed research at Bell Labs by Max Mathews and Jean-Claude Risset, and an MIT thesis (1963) by David Alan Luce.
[10] In 1966–67, Zinovieff, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson ran Unit Delta Plus, an organisation to create and promote electronic music.
[13] It was a synthesiser system which Zinovieff developed with the help of David Cockerell and Peter Grogono, and used two DEC PDP-8 minicomputers and a piano keyboard.
In January, the First London concert of Electronic Music by British composers[16] event was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
[20] In the same year, part of the studio was also recreated at Connaught Hall, for a performance of pieces by Justin Connolly and David Lumsdaine.
[21] At the IFIP congress that year, the composition ZASP by Zinovieff with Alan Sutcliffe took second prize in a contest, behind a piece by Iannis Xenakis.
[25] Jon Lord of Deep Purple described Zinovieff as "a mad professor type": "I was ushered into his workshop and he was in there talking to a computer, trying to get it to answer back".
[37] This started with a commission from TBA21, instigated by Russell Haswell,[35] to create an audio work for the large-scale installation The Morning Line by artist Matthew Ritchie, which contains a 47-speaker spatial sound system.
[38][40] His work during this time combined sounds from live instrumentation and field recordings and continued his long-term interest in computer music and spatial multi-channel performance setups.
[40][35] Embracing the power of modern computer technology allowed him to realise ways of working he had pursued throughout his career in music and electronics.
[29] With violinist Aisha Orazbayeva, Zinovieff composed two concertos for violin and electronics: OUR (2010)[37] and Our Too, premiered at London Contemporary Music Festival in 2014.
[44] A final work in the series, Under The Ice, a 30-minute piece based on recordings of Antarctic glaciers, premiered online on 23 June 2021.
[46][47] Zinovieff's collaboration with cellist Lucy Railton, entitled RFG,[40] was initially conceived as a live piece for a spatially configured loudspeaker system and performed between 2016 and 2017.
[51][52] Between the years 2013–2017, Zinovieff composed an extended computer work, entitled South Pacific Migration Party, derived from hydrophone recordings of blue whales recorded by British oceanographer Susannah Buchan off the coast of Chile and originally proposed and then curated by Andrew Spyrou.
Subsequently, a full b-format rendering of the piece was commissioned by TBA21, and presented at the TBA21-Augarten ambisonic sound space in Vienna, during the exhibition Tidalectics.
