1. AN INTRACTABLE ATTRACTION TO MUSIC EXPERIMENTATION

The mother of Peter Zinovieff was born Princess Sofka Dolgoruky. She had fled Russia in 1919 because of the Bolshevik revolution and was taken to England, where later she met Leo Zinovieff. When their son Peter was born, his parents had married two years prior, in 1931. Shortly afterwards, his parents separated. Sofka married Grey Skipwith, holder of a baronetcy. Her colourful life was told in her own autobiography (Skipwith Reference Skipwith1968), and later her granddaughter Sofka Zinovieff recounted her life and adventures vividly in her biographical book, Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life (Zinovieff Reference Zinovieff2007).

In another book, Zinovieff’s daughter Sofka wrote about rather intimate aspects of her family (Zinovieff Reference Zinovieff2014), particularly of the moment when he turned to music. After obtaining his doctorate in geology, Zinovieff started working in that field. This took him to several exotic places. However, in 1959, at the age of 26, he met his future wife, Victoria Heber-Percy, who was then almost 17. They married the following year. It became apparent that he could not continue his field trips abroad and he decided to remain in London, where he got a job at the Air ministry. At that time, his interest in electronic music began to grow. It was a field still full of uncertainty. Few studios existed in Great Britain or even in the whole of Europe. Some were lavishly – or at least adequately – equipped, such as the GRM in Paris, the Milan studio of Phonology and the WDR studio in Cologne, which were all in the public radio system, or Apelac in Belgium, the Siemens studio in Germany, the Apsome studio of Pierre Henry in Paris, the Gravesano studio of Hermann Scherchen in Switzerland, or the Utrecht Sonology studio in the Netherlands. There were also several private and small studios. None, however, reached the level of development, sophistication and inventiveness that Zinovieff would impulse over the years.

In any case, he started to gather equipment, quit his job and began working with collaborators who built for him some custom equipment – although he did build many himself – and, in a few years, he assembled a complete electronic music studio.

In her 2014 book, The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, London. An Aristocratic Family, a High-Society Scandal, and an Extraordinary Legacy, Sofka Zinovieff alludes to the hippie life led by the couple in those days. As she put it: ‘Victoria and Peter transformed their milieu, embracing the fashionably bohemian ethos of the time and moving from Belgravia to Putney. Gone were my mother’s fitted dresses and shiny shoes from the early period of her marriage; now she wore long Indian skirts, went to pottery classes and smoked the odd joint while listening to Leonard Cohen’ (Zinovieff Reference Zinovieff2014: 331). As for the children, she wrote: ‘Meanwhile, the children went about barefoot, didn’t have many haircuts and weren’t taught manners on principle’ (ibid.)

Sofka was not only a witness and a biographer, but she also later contributed to the life of the Electronic Music Studios (EMS London) Ltd company. She drew several posters, which were used, some of them related to the work of her father on the Birtwistle opera, The Mask of Orpheus. A few reproductions can be seen in Hall (Reference Hall2013, 1500) and in Gardner (Reference Gardner2016: 68, 69).

2. THE FIRST ELECTRONIC MUSIC STUDIO

By the mid-1960s, the studio was, by all accounts and by simply looking at its photos, one of the best electronic music studios of the time. It could easily compete with Milan’s Studio of Phonology, Paris’s GRM and Siemens studio in Germany. As Sofka Zinovieff described it: ‘The place was filled with a mass of winking lights and electronic wires and innards – “probably the most advanced studio in the world”, Peter told a reporter for the Evening Standard” (Zinovieff Reference Zinovieff2014: 331).

A first attempt at creating revenues from the electronic music activity pushed Zinovieff to form a commercial music group with two musicians who worked at the BBC radiophonic workshop: Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. Founded in 1966, it was named Unit Delta Plus. It was hoped that together they could attract firms and create advertisement jingles and music for film and television. It actually did work once, and the group went on stage a few times, notably at the 1967 Million Volt Light and Sound Rave in London. At the time, the group used Zinovieff’s studio. However, Zinovieff did not sustain his interest in that project and Unit Delta Plus ceased its activities that same year. By that time, he wanted to devote his time to music experimentation. That is when he acquired a first computer.

3. COMPUTER CONTROL IN AN ELECTRONIC MUSIC STUDIO

When Zinovieff decided to set up an electronic music studio, soon to become a computer music studio, he called for the collaboration of a young engineer, David Cockerell. He was to build most of the original audio equipment, including the synthesisers and a vocoder that came later. Zinovieff had a flair to find creative people who embraced his dreams. He also had met Tristram Cary, who was to play a major role in the studio as well.

In 1967, Zinovieff had installed a computer, a DEC PDP-8/S, in his studio. He named that first computer Sofka, after his eldest daughter. David Cockerell had started working with Zinovieff since the year before, and it was a collaboration between the two that led to developing a complete hybrid system, by hooking up the analogue sound devices through digital-to-analogue converters to the computer. Programming had to be done in assembly language, a cumbersome task. Peter Grogono, who was later to write software for musical use of the computer, recounted that this machine was equipped with 8K words of internal memory (Grogono Reference Grogono1973: 369).

In any case, in 1968, Zinovieff presented a piece that had been conceived with Alan Sutcliffe, ZASP, at a congress of the International Federation for Information Processing. It had been produced on his PDP-8 computer, driving several pieces of analogue sound-producing equipment. They obtained the second prize, right behind Xenakis’s ST/4–1,080262 for string quartet. In his review of the event, Michael Kassler described ZASP as having been designed by Sutcliffe for its structure, while Zinovieff was in charge of the sonic realisation (Kassler Reference Kassler1969: 176). This piece can now be heard on the CD gathering most of Zinovieff’s production, Electronic Calendar/The EMS Tapes (Zinovieff Reference Zinovieff2015). It was also during this congress that Sutcliffe, with others, proposed the foundation of the Computer Arts Society and the publication of a bulletin, Page, which, over the years, played an important role in the diffusion of the works of artists with machines. Sutcliffe (1930–2014) was a composer and also a programmer and a designer.

In 1969, a second computer was installed, a PDP-8/L, a machine with 4K memory of 12-bit words. It became known as Leo, after his second child. This is when a new collaborator, Peter Grogono, developed a first program. Called MUSYS/1, it was designed to create tasks for the two computers. Leo would receive the user’s listing and compile it, then produce a performance code which was, in turn, sent to Sofka as a ‘delivery program’ for the performance. This last stage consisted in conveying data to the digital-to-analogue converters which, in turn, led control voltages to be applied through a patch matrix to the sound devices (Grogono Reference Grogono1973: 372). These were constantly developed and new ones were added. They also were quite innovative. There was a digital oscillator bank which ‘consists of 64 logically independent oscillators’ (ibid.: 382). Each had a controllable frequency, waveshape, amplitude and envelope. Their controls could be either generated from the computer or the filter bank of 64 filters. That device in itself was a major project: it could receive speech and then convey the analysis of the sound to the bank of oscillators. All this was remarkably innovative and efficient.

A page of the MUSYS/3 program was published in Tristram Cary’s compendium (Cary Reference Cary1992: 98). It is a fragment of the listing for Zinovieff’s variations on a Haydn sonata, a piece he called A Lollipop for Papa. The excerpt shows the use of pseudo-random generators. The use of random number had been an important factor in automatic composition and computer music. Lejaren Hiller, for his 1956–7 Illiac Suite string quarter, relied on them in different ways, as did Iannis Xenakis a few years later, although from a very different approach. At the end of the 1960s, Joel Chadabe incorporated random generation first in his large Moog system, the Coordinated Electronic Music Studio (CEMS), before using them in his computer systems, starting the 1970s. Zinovieff, with his scientific and mathematics training, and also with his understanding of what computers could do, made use of random generation as a powerful tool in his musical thought.

In addition, there was a noise generator and a percussion simulator (Grogono Reference Grogono1973: 370). After the first version of MUSYS, Grogono kept improving the software, until MUSYS/3, which was completed in 1970. That version offered a language that, while not being entirely user-friendly, was much more accessible than the macrogenerator used in the previous version. The software is amply documented, with flow chart, structure and syntax of the language, in Grogono (Reference Grogono1973).

When Zinovieff presented a talk at the meeting of the Fourth European Seminar of the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS), he chose the title ‘Computer control in an electronic music studio’.Footnote ¹ His presentation took place at the University of Edinburgh in September 1968.

A striking event marked the public presentation of that unique endeavour. It took place in January 1968 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. This is when Zinovieff presented to a mesmerised audience his Partita for Unattended Computer.Footnote ² The machine was fed with a program designed to generate random events, which in turn were transmitted to a digital-to-analogue converter. The control voltages were sent to oscillators and the machine was left alone on stage.

Zinovieff mentioned that, later, an additional computer, a PDP-8/E, was added to the arsenal, which increased the internal memory, complemented by digital tape units and a 32-K hard drive (Zinovieff Reference Zinovieff2013: 6).

Several pieces were produced by invited composers. Zinovieff insisted that the studio was open to any composer who had projects, without costs. He also organised visits and month-long workshops. But in some cases, he put himself at the service of older composers who did not manipulate the machine. This was the case with Hans Werner Henze, when working on the composition project Tristan in 1972. Henze wished to submit short fragments of Wagner’s operas to various processing, and Zinovieff was in charge of the musical transformations with the computer. In doing so, he used a program that analysed some Wagner passages. Henze remembered having been summoned in the middle of the night to the studio in Putney: ‘Peter and his beautiful wife, Victoria, were sitting in his software studio, listening, deeply stirred, as his computer kept on pouring out new and fascinating information on the harmonic nature of Wagner’s musical idea’ (Henze Reference Henze1998: 317). Henze concluded: ‘Peter and Victoria were weeping copiously, and for good reason: here was information technology at its most seductive. It was overwhelming’ (ibid.). Another composer with whom Zinovieff worked extensively was Harrison Birtwistle, who became a close friend.

By the early 1970s, the computer-controlled studio had gathered an amount of hardware and software resources, but in few years earlier, Cary had already warned: ‘The more sophisticated studios now have such complete resources that it requires enormous self- discipline by the composer not to be merely pyrotechnic and astonishing, but also thoughtful and interesting’ (Cary Reference Cary1967: 9). The moment came to conceive ‘user-friendly’ and affordable systems to put electronic at reach of many and, maybe, get some revenues by selling them.

4. A LINE OF COMMERCIAL SYNTHESISERS

At that time, a company, EMS (London) Ltd had been formed by Zinovieff, Cockerell and Cary, and had started producing a range of synthesisers, such as the VCS3. The story of how the VCS3 synthesiser came about has been told numerous times (see Candlish Reference Candlish2012). Its particular shape had been designed by Cary, and the electronic circuits by Cockerell. In its conception, much was derived from the experience of the Putney studio. Before the VCS3, a first portable device had been built on the request of an Australian composer, Don Banks, and is now known as the VCS1 and is on display in the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney (Gardner Reference Gardner2017). It was certainly the rather modest price – compared with the American synthesizers of the time – Moog, Buchla, Arp, Electrocomp – as well the matrix, used for driving signals through modules, which made the VCS3 quite successful. Produced in 1969, the synthesiser quickly found its way to the hands of many musicians of various stylistic trends.

I bought mine in 1971. There was no representative of EMS in France at that time. After driving from Paris to London in my little Renault, I ended up on Deodar Road, in the Putney area, near the River Thames. I did not meet Zinovieff that day, but I did purchase my first VCS3 there. I only met him on the occasion of a symposium organised for the 40th anniversary of the studio of the Berlin Technische Universität. A number of pioneers were gathered for this event: Zinovieff, James Tenney, Hugh Davies, Folkmar Hein, Knut Wiggen and many others.Footnote ³

On my way back, the French customs agents asked me what was that I was bringing. Because the word ‘synthesiser’ was not widely used in those days, I simply replied ‘An organ’, and that is what was written on the customs form. A few years later, that VCS3 and the few others we had gathered in my university, Paris 8, were connected to an Intellec 8 microcomputer and a dedicated language was written by Patrick Greussay, Intelgreu, hence replicating, in a way, a similar approach Zinovieff had taken in his studio many years ago (Arveiller et al. Reference Arveiller, Battier, Colere, Dalmasso, Englert, Greussay and Roncin1978).

The Synthi A, essentially a VCS3 in a plastic Spartanite suitcase, is a synthesiser still much sought after. It has given birth to a number of clones. Itself was followed by the Synthi AKS, which came with a flat black and blue keyboard with a digital sequencer. Also in 1971 arrived the gigantic and elegant Synthi 100. That studio synthesiser, based on the VCS3 with a large matrix conceived to accommodate the numerous oscillators and processing modules, found its way to various studios in Europe, Australia and America.

The mystique of analogue synthesizers caught on, and today original EMS products fetch very high prices. This happened only in the last decade. Around 2010, a British auction house sold what was described as ‘Dr Zinovieff’s original Synthi A’. It was also advertised as the one that appeared on an advertisement flyer which claimed ‘Every Picnic Needs a Synthi’, although prior to the auction, the instrument was retrofitted with a genuine Spartanite case and entirely revised by Robin Wood. For the rather modest sum of £6,050, the Paris Museum of Music, which had offered the highest bid, obtained that synthesiser, now on display in its twentieth-century musical instruments collection, next to a 1971 VCS3 with its DK2 keyboard, the 1965 Moog synthesizer, which had been ordered by Eric Siday in New York, and Frank Zappa Emu synthesisers. Today, a genuine EMS synthesiser from the 1970s can only be found for extremely high prices, although it is still possible to acquire a Synthi A or a VCS3 based on the original design from Robin Wood. He worked at EMS (London) Ltd in the 1970s and, in 1995, acquired the company and valiantly kept building those.

To respond to today’s thirst for analogue synthesisers, a number of clones and instruments inspired by the EMS synthesisers are available. To name a few: the Portabella, a clone of the Synthi A by Pin Electronics, without the VU-meter, but with actual pins; and the Syntrix, made by Erica in Latvia. That one has a digital matrix that allows up to 254 patch memories. The VCS3 and VCS300 by Switchtrix (UK), also equipped with a digital matrix, with up to 99 memories; like the Syntrix, they allow for a sample and hold module, which can sample the signal provided by the noise generator, or the trapezoid signal from the envelope generator. Behringer published some photos of their own version of a VCS3 – with actual pins. At the time of this writing, it is only announced to enter into production at a later date. Considering that the company has recently produced a clone of the Arp 2600, the Mini Moog and many other devices, this may very well be.

In the years following the launch of the VCS3, EMS (London) Ltd built an amazing number of instruments and devices, besides the highly portable Synthi A and the extremely large Synthi 100. Many auxiliary devices were conceived one after the other, from a filter bank to a vocoder, several variations of synthesisers, more or less simple, and sometimes not quite reliable. It would be interesting to document the complete hardware production so that a picture of all the efforts and the brilliancy of the designs could be drawn. Among the devices built, it is worth mentioning the name of Peter Easty, who built a bank of 256 digital filters, called ‘The Analytical Engine’ (Zinovieff Reference Zinovieff2013: 7); since the filters had a variable Q, they could be turned into sine wave oscillators, at a time when, in Italy, Giuseppe Di Giugno was building a bank of digital oscillators, before being recruited by Luciano Berio and moving to Ircam where he finalised the 4A, a bank of 256 digital oscillators driven by a DEC PDP-11 computer. Easty, right after having completed his project, was also recruited by Ircam, as was David Cockerell.

What seems to have happened at the end is that, instead on focusing on a few products which sold a reasonable amount, EMS diversified so much that they started losing money. Also, it was difficult to compete against the afflux of a burgeoning American and Japanese synthesizer industry. The demise of EMS is also well documented. In 1979, the studio closed down, the equipment ended up in storage in a basement of the National Theatre, where it fell victim of a flood and was scraped (Sutcliffe Reference Sutcliffe2013: 15).

5. LEGACY

During the 1960s, Zinovieff received some recognition of his musical works, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. His compositions from his studio in London have emerged here and there. The famous issue of Studio International devoted to the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity was accompanied by a vinyl record.Footnote ⁴ Zinovieff had a piece (along with Iannis Xenakis, Herbert Brün, John Cage, Lejaren Hiller and others). This is where is January Tensions can be heard. Fortunately, this piece was reissued on a double CD published in 2015 by Space Age Recordings. The album gathers a number of pieces seldom heard, such as some works composed with Birtwistle and Henze, and a number of pieces by Zinovieff (Reference Zinovieff2015).

One of his finest contributions has been his work on the libretto of Birtwistle’s opera, The Mask of Orpheus (Reference Birtwistle1998). This endeavour took him around ten years. It was hoped that some electronic parts would be produced in the EMS studio, but in the end, this was not meant to be. It was Barry Anderson, the founder, among other things, of the West Square Electronic Music Ensemble, who worked on the extensive electronic parts. For this project, he spent several years at Ircam in Paris, from an initial research period in 1982 where he experimented with the Institute’s Buchla 200 synthesiser, the 4A bank of digital oscillators and the CHANT program. He then entered a period of production from 1983 and finished it, although he remained in Paris where he was met with his premature death in 1987. Meanwhile, he produced is own piece, Arc, for bass clarinet, string quartet and computer-generated tape.Footnote ⁵

The libretto and the opera itself are considered one of the most important British work of the second half of the twentieth century. Several studies have been published, in which Zinovieff’s role is amply emphasised (Cross Reference Cross2009; Beard Reference Beard2012; Hall Reference Hall, Beard, Gloag and Jones2015). Jonathan Cross’s book includes an extensive discussion with Zinovieff about the genesis of the libretto: it is quite enlightening to see his literary environment, as well as his intimate relations with Greece and myths (Cross Reference Cross2009: 147–55). The Mask of Orpheus, an opera of more than three hours, was premiered by the English National Opera in 1986 at the London Coliseum.Footnote ⁶

In the past decade, he returned to composing. He chose to collaborate with several younger artists. Together they produced works, some of them having been recorded and made available (such as Zinovieff and Railton Reference Zinovieff and Railton2020).

Zinovieff did not leave many writings. Fortunately, he gave a number of interviews, mostly in the past decade, some of them having been posted online on YouTube. They help understand his personality and his artistic goals. For many, Zinovieff remains the force behind the conception of the EMS synthesisers. His interviews show many other aspects of his artistic ideas.

Five years after Robert Moog, Donald Buchla and Paolo Ketoff created their first synthesisers, the EMS instruments left an indelible mark on the music of the 1970s. However, Zimovieff is above all a man who was driven by a quest for experimentation and invention, full of original ideas, and always tempted by literature.