Peter Zinovieff: Interview
I spoke to him in June 2021, just a month before his
death at the age of 88. He talked about learning tape-splicing from female pioneer Daphne
Oram, the complex and intensive process of making computer music in the 1960s, working with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire
and Brian Hodgson, and being one of the first people in the world to have a
computer in his home. He also explained how he felt no kinship with 1960s counterculture.
You were building your own devices in the early days,
before synthesizers and computers were on the market. Where did you get all the
parts from?
Lisle Street in London. Lisle Street was entirely devoted
to army surplus and RAF [Royal Air Force] surplus shops. I mean, every other
shop was a surplus shop. They were selling sinewave oscillators, oscilloscopes,
waveform generators, filters and tons of stuff which I didn’t recognise.
What drew you to this kind of experimentation in the
first place? Very few people were doing things like this at the time.
Well, I liked experimental music and I was a scientist. Perfect.
How do you how do you start out building your studio?
What did you begin with?
I suppose I must have I must have started with a tape
recorder. I don't really remember what the first thing was. I know I went to
see Daphne Oram who had been at the [BBC] Radiophonic Workshop. I went to have
lessons and Daphne Oram taught me about tape-splicing and speeding up tapes and
slowing them down. And she taught me about tape splicing. Have you tried it?
It's time-consuming and you need a lot of patience. It made me resolve not to
do tape-splicing – it was very time-consuming, and anyway it seemed idiotic
because the whole thing of electronics was advancing, so it was pretty obvious
to try and do it electronically rather than mechanically. Even if there wasn't
a computer you could buy yet when I started.
Did you see your studio as a research facility?
No, it was meant to make music. Even if it was in a state
of flux a lot of the time because of putting in new things. You really have to
understand that at one point, when I got a computer, I had no idea what to do
with the computer, nor did anybody else. And it completely revolutionised the
way one had to think about controlling electronic music or producing electronic
music.
Programming wasn’t like nowadays, it was extremely
cumbersome, there was no screen and everything had to be done on this very slow
keyboard, and you had to produce a punch tape, which had to be fed in, you had
to use machine language and it was extremely slow and there were errors, and
there was no hard drive so nothing was stored – when you turned on the
computer, it had nothing in its memory at all. And so it was just a totally
different way of thinking about how, in the end, a musical sound - or any sound
- would come out by typing on a keyboard.
So it was hard to imagine the actual sound that would
emerge in the end?
Well, you have to imagine that [EMS
electronics engineer and designer] David Cockerell, for instance, would make me
an oscillator. And in order to control the oscillator, I would have to send a
command to the oscillator to say, “Are you ready to receive data?” Obviously,
it would send a command to the computer, saying, “Yes, I’m ready.” You would
then say, “Here’s the first bit of data”, and probably, you would have to send
three bits of data in order to get a frequency, then you would have to go to
another device, which said how long that was to last. And then you would have
to do exactly the same process over an amplifier. And then another one over an
envelope generator, before you actually had a sound, let alone a sequence of
sounds.
So even just saying this to you
conjures up the sort of time it took just to develop something which made any
sound at all. And then of course I got more fluent at it. But not having a
screen and not having a hard drive so that nothing was stored - when you turned
off the computer, there was nothing; if you turned it on, it had nothing in its
memory at all, nothing. So it was it was just incomparable to now, for
instance, when I'm sitting in front of my three screens and my huge amount of
memory and I have a tenth of a petabyte of data - it's completely incomparable
to what it was like then.
The commitment of people working in electronic sound
in that period was amazing – to dedicate so much time and effort to trying to
create something and sometimes not knowing what would emerge at the end of it. Did
you have an idea about the kind of sounds you could create?
At the beginning, I had no idea how to make a sound. It
was like taking a stick and thinking you might be able to make a flute out of
it, but you've first of all got to make some holes and hollow it out. So first
before you can get a flute sound you need
a nice tool which will dig out the centre of the stick and then a drill.
So you have to know how to manipulate the drill before you can even think about
playing a sound on it. That's what it was like then.
You had one of
the first commercially-available computers…
Nobody else had a
computer in their house. So there was nobody to ask, you know, “How do you do
this?” So it was much harder to find out about things. I mean, there
were people with tape studios like Tristram Cary or the Radiophonic Workshop,
but there was nobody using a computer.
EMS’s premises in London has been described as a kind
of salon in the sense that you invited interesting people in just to see what
they could make of the equipment you had. Was it really like that?
Not really no. No, it wasn't like that. If somebody was
to come and work on a project, it would be pretty full-on and they'd come every
day, and that would be the project, it wouldn't be anybody else. I worked with
lots of different composers and did some lovely things with Hans Werner Henze
and Harrison Birtwistle and others. We did have visitors but it wasn’t that
people could come and play around [on the equipment], as it were.
Was the musical exploration at EMS connected in any
way to the alternative culture of the time, which was exploring new ways of
artistic perception through psychedelic drugs and freeform artistic happenings
like the performances staged by art groups like Fluxus?
No. I don’t see what all that’s got to do with electronic
music. This was experimental music, it was nothing to do with drug-taking or
hippies. People have always experimented. And I don’t see why contemporary
music has to be connected to contemporary art. I was doing music, not art.
You worked briefly as Unit Delta Plus with Delia
Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the BBC Radiophonic workshop. How did you
assess them as composers?
It never worked out because they never had the patience
to cope with this amazing studio I had, they were used to very quick work at
the Radiophonic Workshop and they were interested more in making commercial
music for advertising jingles and selling it, and that wasn’t what I was
interested in. I was interested in the equivalent of classical music, working
with serious composers in a new way.
They couldn't cope with the computer. I mean, looking
back, nobody could have actually coped with it. I dare say now if I went and
sat in front of anybody's computer, after a week or so I would be able to be
making some sounds and probably actually be quite familiar with what they've
got. Some computers, I'd be able to go in straight away and do stuff.
But with my computer, what could you do? At the
beginning, nobody else actually understood how my computer worked. It was a
mystery to everybody. There was nothing to look at. It would take months to
understand the programming. And exactly the same with Delia and Brian - it
remained a mystery, and one which was too complicated for them to even think of
using.
That's how it was. It was as if I’d built this incredible
maze and nobody could find their way through it. And I can see that now. I
mean, it couldn’t have been more complicated really. Perhaps it's my nature to
make things impossible.
EMS
sold the first commercially-produced British synthesizer, the VCS3, as well as
operating as a private studio for your own work.
When I started EMS, the point was to design and sell
synthesizers in order to fund the studio because it was so expensive.
Initially you didn't have keyboards with the
synthesizers you were making.
I didn't want
keyboards. And indeed, the first keyboards which we had were really
controllers rather than diatonic keyboards. In fact, there was one Whole Earth
Catalog [magazine] review which said that EMS was so out of it that
they didn't even know that the low notes of the keyboard were at the bottom end
on the left-hand side because when they tried it out, it had been set up as
reversed.
So in the end, in the end, I did have a keyboard which
each key could be programmed by the computer to do whatever you like so it
could make a sound or control a sound or
it could just turn on a relay and start a tape recorder. And still although I
have keyboards now, I'm still pretty against them. I like playing the piano but
I wish somehow I could control my marvellous Native Instruments keyboard in
another way.
The VCS3 synthesizer brought you into contact with all
these rock and pop musicians who saw it as a tool for experimenting. Had you
anticipated this?
Of course not, no. I didn’t really like it very much. I
was into experimental music. I really didn’t anticipate having such an impact
on rock musicians. Nobody could anticipate that. I just thought there'd be a
few people who might be interested to experiment.
Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, May 24, 2021.
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