Peter Zinovieff

Peter Zinovieff (born 26 January 1933) is a British engineer and composer, 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 and White Noise, and Krautrock groups as well as more pop-oriented artists, including Todd Rundgren and David Bowie. He continues to work 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'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. 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, part of the studio was 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 Robert Monkhouse, and EMS produced it as the Spectron.
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". Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, in their history of the synthesizer revolution, see him rather as aristocratically averse to "trade".
Zinovieff wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera "The Mask of Orpheus", and also the words for "Nenia: The Death of Orpheus" (1970). The section "Tristan's Folly" in "Tristan" (1975) by Hans Werner Henze included a tape by Zinovieff. 
Activity as a composer (2010 to present).
After a break of many years, in 2010 Zinovieff became active again publicly in music composition.
This started with a commission from TBA21, instigated by Russell Haswell, 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. The result was "Bridges from Somewhere and Another to Somewhere Else", shown during its exhibition in Istanbul. A second piece "Good Morning Ludwig" was commissioned in 2012 when the installation moved permanently to ZKM, Karlsruhe.
Since then Zinovieff has continued to work primarily as a composer. His new work combines sounds from live instrumentation and field recordings and continues his long-term interest in computer music and spatial multi-channel performance setups. Embracing the power of modern computer technology has allowed him to realise ways of working he has pursued throughout his career in music and electronics.
With violinist Aisha Orazbayeva he has composed two concertos for violin and electronics: "OUR" (2010) and "Our Too", premiered at London Contemporary Music Festival in 2014.
An ongoing series of works in collaboration with poet Katrina Porteous combine poetry with soundscapes created by Zinovieff using sound sources related to physics and astronomy. The first piece, "Horse" (2011), was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Subsequent works with Porteous have been commissioned by the Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne for live performance in its planetarium. These pieces "Edge" (2013), "Field" (2015), "Sun" (2016) are surround-sound works with live visuals created by planetarium supervisor Christopher Hudson. A further work in the series, focusing on recordings of Antarctic glaciers, is in progress as of 2019.
His collaboration with cellist Lucy Railton, entitled "RFG," was initially conceived as a live piece for a spatially configured loudspeaker system and performed between 201617. An album version was released as "RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer" on PAN in 2020.
A retrospective compilation covering his work in the EMS era, including collaborations with Hans Werner Henze and Harrison Birtwistle, was compiled by musician Pete Kember and released in 2015.
In 2015 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree by Anglia Ruskin University.
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.
Selected discography.
Solo and collaborative works.
with Harrison Birtwistle
with Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Werner Henze and others
with Aisha Orazbayeva
with Lucy Railton