Synthesizer pro Peter Zinovieff dies
Peter Zinovieff, a composer and inventor whose pioneering synthesizers shaped albums by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk, died on June 23 in Cambridge, England. He was 88.
His death was announced on Twitter by his daughter Sofka Zinovieff, who said he had been hospitalized after a fall.
Zinovieff oversaw the design of the first commercially produced British synthesizers. In 1969, his company, EMS (Electronic Music Studios), introduced the VCS3 (for “voltage controlled studio”), one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers. Instruments from EMS soon became a staple of 1970s progressive-rock, particularly from Britain and Germany. The company’s slogan was “Think of a sound, now make it.”
Peter Zinovieff was born on Jan. 26, 1933, in London, the son of émigré Russian aristocrats: a princess, Sofka Dolgorouky, and Leo Zinovieff. His parents divorced in 1937.
Peter’s grandmother taught him piano when he was in primary school. He attended Oxford University, where he played in experimental music groups while earning a Ph.D. in geology. He also dabbled in electronics.
He married Victoria Heber-Percy, then 17, who came from a wealthy family. She and her parents were unhappy with the extensive travel that a geologist’s career required. After Zinovieff worked briefly for the Air Ministry in London as a mathematician, he turned to making electronic music full time, supported by his wife.
He bought tape recorders and microphones and found high-quality oscillators, filters and signal analyzers at military-surplus stores. Daphne Oram, the electronic-music composer who was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, taught him techniques of making music by splicing together bits of sound recorded on magnetic tape in the era of musique concrète.
But Zinovieff decided that cutting tape was tedious. He built a primitive sequencer — a device to trigger a set of notes repeatedly — from telephone-switching hardware, and he began working on electronic sequencers with the electrical engineers Mark Dowson and Dave Cockerell. They realized that early digital computers, which were already used to control factory processes, might also control sound processing.
Zinovieff’s wife sold her pearl and turquoise wedding tiara for 4,000 British pounds, now about $96,000, to finance Zinovieff’s purchase of a PDP-8 computer designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Living in Putney, a district of London, Zinovieff installed it in his garden shed, and he often cited it as the world’s first home computer. He added a second PDP-8; the two units, which he named Sofka and Leo, could control hundreds of oscillators and other sound modules.
The shed was now an electronic-music studio. Cockerell was an essential partner; he was able to build the devices that Zinovieff envisioned.
In 1966, Zinovieff formed the short-lived Unit Delta Plus with Delia Derbyshire (who created the electronic arrangement of Ron Grainer’s theme for the BBC science fiction institution “Doctor Who”) and Brian Hodgson to make electronic ad jingles.
Peter Grogono, a programmer working with Cockerell and Zinovieff, devised software to perform digital audio analysis and manipulation, presaging modern sampling.
In 1969, Zinovieff, Cockerell and Tristram Cary, an electronic composer with his own studio, formed EMS. They built a rudimentary synthesizer the size of a shoe box for Australian composer Don Banks that they later referred to as the VCS1.
In November, they unveiled the more elaborate VCS3, also known as the Putney. It used specifications from Zinovieff, a case and controls designed by Cary and circuitry designed by Cockerell (who drew on Robert Moog’s filter design research). It was priced at 330 pounds, about $7,700 now.
Yet the VCS3 was smaller and cheaper than other early synthesizers; the Minimoog didn’t arrive until 1970 and was more expensive. The original VCS3 had no keyboard and was best suited to generating abstract sounds, but EMS soon made a touch-sensitive keyboard module available. The VCS3 also had an input so it could process external sounds.
Musicians embraced the VCS3 along with other EMS instruments.
EMS synthesizers are prominent in songs like Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” and the Who used a VCS3 to process the sound of an electric organ on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” King Crimson, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, Aphex Twin and others also used EMS synthesizers.
Zinovieff learned new software, on computers exponentially more powerful than his 1970s equipment, and returned to composing throughout the 2010s, including pieces for cello and computer, for violin and computer and for computer and the spoken word.
Zinovieff’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jenny Jardine, and by six children. and nine grandchildren.