Son[i]a #286
Peter Zinovieff
An isolated garden shed overlooking the Thames, the first personal computer in the world and the romantic vision of creating an emotional musical machine: this was the setting in which Peter Zinovieff, composer, engineer and geologist, took his first steps towards becoming a legendary pioneer of electronic music in the 1960s.
Back then, Zinovieff was busy creating a studio in a private house in London in which he used a PDP-8 computer to control sound generating equipment. This computer had four kilobytes of memory and no hard drive. When he later expanded it with 32 kilobytes of storage, he thought he’d never fill it. Similar computers had previously only been used in factories, universities and laboratories, so it’s little wonder that Zinovieff’s compositions from that period are probing sound experiments, and that his studio was so intricate to navigate. Later that decade, Zinovieff would also use PDP-8s for the first-ever unaccompanied performance of live computer music.
The need to financially sustain this studio would eventually lead Zinovieff to launch EMS with partners David Cockerel and Tristram Cary. A company dedicated to manufacturing portable synthesisers, EMS manufactured the best-selling VCS3 as well as other pieces of electronic music equipment such as the Synthi, the MUSYS and the Vocoder. At the end of the 1960s, EMS was one of four companies offering commercial synthesizers, along with ARP, Buchla and Moog, but it went bankrupt in the 1970s leading Zinovieff to part with his studio.
Throughout his career Zinovieff collaborated mostly with Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze, but his work and studio spurred the interest of myriad bands, musicians and composers from academia to pop stardom, from Ringo Starr to Karlheinz Stockhausen. Together with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, Zinovieff also ran Unit Delta Plus, an organization to create commercial electronic music that mostly proved unproductive. Following a hiatus of about twenty years during the 80s and 90s, artist Russell Haswell commissioned a new work from Peter Zinovieff in 2011. Since then, he has been back at composing and challenging electronic music as we know it.
In this podcast, Zinovieff talks about how he assembled the world’s first personal computer, his time at EMS and the team that accompanied him, about the listening room, academia; about engineering, experimentation and how not to keep a sound archive; about Unit Delta Plus, how to run a synthesiser off a windmill, and how to kindly ask a computer to make us a beautiful composition.
Musical citations
01 Peter Zinovieff, “January tensions”, 1968 (4:45)
02 Peter Zinovieff, “Tarantella”, 1966 (3:46)
03 Peter Zinovieff and Alan Sutcliffe, “March probabilistic”, 1968 (4:19)
04 Peter Zinovieff “Lollipop for Papa”, 1968 (6:25)
05 Peter Zinovieff and Alan Sutcliffe, “ZASP”, 1968 (5:10)
06 Peter Zinovieff and Harrison Birtwistle, “Chronometer”, 1971 (24:16)
07 Peter Zinovieff and Hans Werner Henze, “Tristan (long section)”, 1973 (7:39)
08 Peter Zinovieff, “Now’s the time to say goodbye”, 1978 (4:11)
Peter Blasser
Peter Blasser is a designer of electronic instruments and one-of-a-kind in the world of synthesizer builders. His circuit designs catalyse philosophical concepts in the form of whimsical analog synthesizers that have been evolving since he started his company, Ciat-Lonbarde, in Baltimore more than 15 years ago. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and meditates on his view on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. In this podcast, Peter Blasser introduces us to his environmental instruments and reflects on his views on electronics and synthesizers as a form of creativity. He invokes elements such as wood, sunlight, wind, touch and craft in the process.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with instrument designer and maker Peter Blasser that we were unable to include the first time around. We talked about wood working, worldmaking and esoteric instruments.
Elektronmusikstudion (EMS)
In 1953, after attending the first Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Society electronic music concert with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote a manifesto for concrete poetry. More than a decade later, the Swedish Radio broadcasted his pioneer radio piece “Fåglar I Sverige (Birds in Sweden)”. In the decades that followed, the complexity and broad spectrum of productions coming out of the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), founded by Karl Birger in 1964, made it a hub for artists. But while the text-sound scene was in and out of the Sound Workshop, Knut Wiggen, the first director of the EMS, channelled his energy into the futuristic dream of creating a world-class computer music studio for experts and scholars.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Peter Zinovieff that we were unable to include the first time around.
John Chowning
John Chowning shares the experience of being a pioneer in a discipline at a time when using computers to generate music was a leap into the void between creative eccentricity and scientific adventure.