Peter Zinovieff (26 January 1933 – 23 June 2021) was a British composer, musician and inventor. 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 and White Noise, and Krautrock groups as well as more pop-orientated artists, including Todd Rundgren and David Bowie. In later life, he worked primarily as a composer of electronic music.
Early life and education
Zinovieff was born on 26 January 1933; his parents, Leo Zinovieff and Sofka, née Princess Sophia Dolgorouky, were both Russian aristocrats, who met in London after their families had emigrated to escape the Russian Revolution and soon divorced. During World War II, he and his brother Ian lived with their grandparents in Guildford and then with their father in Sussex. He attended Guildford Royal Grammar School, Gordonstoun School and Oxford University, where he earned a doctorate in geology.
Career in music and electronics
Zinovieff bought his first computer from the proceeds gained from auctioning his first wife's tiara. It raised £4,000 (equivalent to £80,000 in 2021). He used this computer to control an array of oscillators and amplifiers he had bought from an army surplus store. He claimed that "This was the first computer in the world in a private house".
Zinovieff's work followed research at Bell Labs by Max Mathews and Jean-Claude Risset, and an MIT thesis (1963) by David Alan Luce. In 1966–67, Zinovieff, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson ran Unit Delta Plus, an organisation to create and promote electronic music. It was based in the studio Zinovieff had built, in a shed at his house in Putney. (The house is near the Thames, and the studio was later partially destroyed by a flood). EMS grew out of MUSYS, which was a performance controller operating as an analogue–digital hybrid. 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. It was marketed as being more portable than the huge Moog system, and at one point Robert Moog offered to sell out to EMS for one million dollars. Zinovieff turned down this deal.
Unit Delta Plus ran a concert of electronic music at the Watermill Theatre in 1966, with a light show. In early 1967 they performed in concerts at The Roundhouse, at which the Carnival of Light was also played; they split up later in 1967. Paul McCartney had visited the studio, but Zinovieff had little interest in popular music.
In 1968, Zinovieff's computer music system featured in several pioneering events in London. In January, the First London concert of Electronic Music by British composers event was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Alongside pieces by Delia Derbyshire and Tristram Cary, the concert included the premiere of Zinovieff's Partita for Unattended Computer, the first ever unaccompanied performance of live computer music, with no human performer involved, and the piece read from paper tape. The programmes were covered in foil so the audience could participate by rustling them. Later that year, as part of Cybernetic Serendipity, the first UK international exhibition devoted to the relationship between the arts and new technology at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Zinovieff and his team created a computer system, based on the PDP-8, which could analyse a tune whistled by a visitor to the show and improvise upon it.
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. 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.
In 1969, Zinovieff sought financing through an ad in The Times but received only one response, £50 on the mistaken premise it was the price of a synthesiser. Instead he formed EMS with Cockerell and Tristram Cary. At the end of the 1960s, EMS Ltd. was one of four companies offering commercial synthesizers, the others being ARP, Buchla, and Moog. In the 1970s Zinovieff became interested in the video synthesizer developed by Richard Monkhouse, and EMS produced it as the Spectron.