Peter Zinovieff

Peter Zinovieff (born 26 January 1933) is a British engineer, whose EMS company made the VCS3 synthesizer in the late 1960s. The synthesizer was used by many early progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd[3] and White Noise, and Krautrock groups [4] as well as more pop-oriented artists, including Todd Rundgren and David Bowie.

Peter Zinovieff
Born (1933-01-26) 26 January 1933[1]
Fulham, Greater London, England[2]
EducationGuildford Royal Grammar School
Gordonstoun School
Alma materOxford University
Occupationengineer and inventor
Known forCo-founder, EMS
Spouse(s)Victoria Heber-Percy (m. 1960)
Rose Verney (m. 1978)
Children7, including Sofka Zinovieff
Parent(s)Leo Zinovieff
Sofka, née Princess Sophia Dolgorouky
RelativesRobert Heber-Percy (father-in-law)

Early life and education

Zinovieff was born on 26 January 1933;[5] 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.[6] 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.[7][8]

Career in music and electronics

Zinovieff's work followed research at Bell Labs by Max Mathews and Jean-Claude Risset, and an MIT thesis (1963) by David Alan Luce.[9] 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).[10][11] EMS grew out of MUSYS, which was a performance controller operating as an analogue-digital hybrid.[12] 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.[13] 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.[11] Paul McCartney had visited the studio, but Zinovieff had little interest in popular music.[14]

In 1968, part of the studio was recreated at Connaught Hall, for a performance of pieces by Justin Connolly and David Lumsdaine.[15] 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.[16]

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.[17] At the end of the 1960s, EMS Ltd. was one of four companies offering commercial synthesizers, the others being ARP, Buchla, and Moog.[18] In the 1970s Zinovieff became interested in the video synthesizer developed by Robert Monkhouse, and EMS produced it as the Spectron.[19]

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".[20] Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, in their history of the synthesizer revolution, see him rather as aristocratically averse to "trade".[21]

Zinovieff wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Mask of Orpheus,[22] and also the words for Nenia: The Death of Orpheus (1970).[23] The section Tristan's Folly in Tristan (1975) by Hans Werner Henze included a tape by Zinovieff.[24] He continues to work as a composer of electronic music.

Personal life

In 1960, Zinovieff married Victoria Heber-Percy, daughter of Robert Heber-Percy and Jennifer Ross; in 1978, he married Rose Verney. He has seven children and eight grandchildren.[25]

Notes
  1. "Peter Zinovieff - New Songs, Playlists & Latest News - BBC Music". BBC. Retrieved 19 December 2019.
  2. England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1916–2007
  3. Notably on The Dark Side of the Moon: Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days, Harvard University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-674-01617-3, p. 293.
  4. Pinch and Trocco, p. 297.
  5. Sofka Zinovieff, Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life, London: Granta, 2007, ISBN 978-1-86207-919-9, p. 185.
  6. Pinch and Trocco, pp. 276, p. 278.
  7. Zinovieff, p. 295.
  8. Pinch and Trocco, p. 279.
  9. Curtis Roads (January 1996). The Computer Music Tutorial. MIT Press. pp. 547–8. ISBN 978-0-262-68082-0.
  10. Zinovieff, pp. 327–28: "by the end of the 1960s, Peter had three children and ran an electronic music studio from a garden shed by the river in Putney".
  11. Unit Delta Plus at delia-derbyshire.org, retrieved 6 January 2015.
  12. "EMS Synthesisers, Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary, David Cockerell United Kingdom, 1969, 120 Years of Electronic Music". 30 January 2014. Retrieved 6 January 2015.
  13. "Zinovieff with VC3 in his garden". Archived from the original on 7 August 2011. Retrieved 25 January 2011.
  14. Mark Brend (6 December 2012). The Sound of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music Was Smuggled into the Mainstream. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 4–5. ISBN 978-1-62356-529-9.
  15. Anthony Gilbert, SPNM Composers' Weekend, The Musical Times Vol. 109, No. 1508 (Oct., 1968), p. 946. Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/953598
  16. Michael Kassler, Report from Edinburgh, Perspectives of New Music Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1969) , pp. 175-177. Published by: Perspectives of New Music. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/832302
  17. "All About EMS: Part 1", Musical Matrices, Sound on Sound November 2000, retrieved 19 April 2010.
  18. Peter Manning (2004). Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford University Press. p. 201. ISBN 978-0-19-514484-0.
  19. Chris Meigh-Andrews, Peter Donebauer, Richard Monkhouse and the Development of the EMS Spectron and the Videokalos Image Processor, Leonardo Vol. 40, No. 5 (2007) , pp. 463-467, 450-451, at p. 463. Published by: The MIT Press. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20206483
  20. Pinch and Trocco, p. 293.
  21. Pinch and Trocco, p. 300.
  22. Michael Kennedy (22 April 2004). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music. Oxford University Press. p. 459. ISBN 978-0-19-860884-4.
  23. David Wright and Harrison Birtwistle, Clicks, Clocks & Claques. David Wright Investigates Cliques and the Claques in the Music of Birtwistle, 60 This Month, The Musical Times Vol. 135, No. 1817 (Jul., 1994) , pp. 426-431, at p. 430. Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1003251
  24. R. H. Bales, Review, Tristan by Hans Werner Henze, Computer Music Journal Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), p. 63. Published by: The MIT Press. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4617906
  25. Peter Zinovieff on thepeerage.com, 20 November 2008, accessed 18 April 2010.

Further reading
  • Sofka Skipwith. Sofka, the Autobiography of a Princess. London: Hart-Davis, 1968. OCLC 504549593. Autobiography by his mother.
  • Sofka Zinovieff. Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life. London: Granta, 2007. ISBN 978-1-86207-919-9. Biography of his mother by his daughter.
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