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The Times JUNE 28, 2021 - by Staff Writers

PETER ZINOVIEFF OBITUARY

Electronic music composer and synthesizer pioneer who engineered sounds for Pink Floyd, David Bowie and Kraftwerk

Known among his fellow musicians as the "mad professor", Peter Zinovieff changed the sound of modern music by showing everyone from The Beatles to Stockhausen how to use synthesizers to expand the sonic scope of their work.

Zinovieff invented his pioneering VCS3 synthesizer in the 1960s at about the same time that Robert Moog was developing similar technology in America. His machines were used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side Of The Moon and by The Who on Won't Get Fooled Again. Others who championed Zinovieff's invention included David Bowie, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, King Crimson and Kraftwerk, as well as the contemporary classical composers Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze (obituary, Oct 29, 2012).

Zinovieff gave personal instruction to those using his synthesizers, including Sir Paul McCartney, whose interest was alerted when he attended a concert of electronic music given by Zinovieff under the name Unit Delta Plus, a grouping that also included Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

McCartney recalled visiting Zinovieff and Derbyshire in "a hut at the bottom of the garden full of tape machines and funny instruments". It led to a 1967 collaboration at the Roundhouse in London billed as a "Million Volt Light and Sound Rave" with "music by Paul McCartney and Unit Delta Plus". The works performed included McCartney's fourteen-minute avant garde electronic composition Carnival Of Light, which The Beatles recorded but which has never been released.

Deep Purple's Jon Lord (obituary July 17, 2012), also recalled visiting Zinovieff in the garden shed of his Putney home, which was his first studio. He found him "talking to a computer, trying to get it to answer back".

Karlheinz Stockhausen (obituary December 8, 2007) was "very brusque and German" when he visited the shed but he still used one of Zinovieff's later synthesizers, the Synthi 100, on his 1977 electronic composition Sirius.

Zinovieff had a more congenial time contributing an electronic movement to Henze's Tristan, which was premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis at the Royal Festival Hall in 1974. He also wrote the libretto for Birtwistle's opera The Mask Of Orpheus, premiered by the English National Opera in 1986 and revived in 2019.

The pair spent ten years labouring on the opera, Zinovieff working on it on Raasay, an island off Skye, where he had built a home from the ruins of an old crofter's cottage. Birtwistle also bought a property on the island, where their synths were reputedly powered by a windmill. Zinovieff's libretto was based on a digital voice transmission system he had developed called Vocom.

Another of his claims was that he invented sampling when he and Birtwistle composed Chronometer '71, comprising recordings of the ticking of Big Ben and the great clock in Wells Cathedral. Two years later Pink Floyd utilised a similar effect on the track Time on Dark Side Of The Moon.

Somewhat surprisingly, his own listening tastes were more traditional. Sofka Zinovieff, the oldest of his seven children, recalled that as a child "There was always music playing, but it tended to be Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert." Sofka survives him along with her siblings Leo, Kolinka, Freya, Kitty and Eliena. Another son, Kyril, died in 2015. He is also survived by Jenny Jardine, his fourth wife, with whom he lived in Cambridge. His first three marriages to Victoria (née Heber-Percy), Rose (née Verney) and Tanya (née Richardson) ended in divorce and were described by Zinovieff as "tumultuous".

Peter Zinovieff was born in London in 1933, the son of Sofka (née Princess Sophia Dolgorouky) and Leo Zinovieff, Russian aristocrats whose families had escaped the Russian Revolution. His parents divorced when he was young and much of his childhood was spent living with grandparents in Guildford. Educated at the Royal Grammar School in Guildford, Gordonstoun and Oxford University, he earned a doctorate in geology. He pursued it professionally, mapping dormant volcanoes and surveying Cyprus.

Music and electronics were hobbies. He recalled playing "thundering duets" on the piano as a boy with his grandmother and had a youthful fascination with building radio sets. The decision to abandon geology and build a synthesizer was a "middle-of-the-night" decision.

His first wife, who came from a wealthy family, had a "ridiculous tiara made of turquoise and pearls" which he persuaded her to sell. At auction it raised £4,000 (£80,000 in today's value) and he spent the lot on a computer to control the oscillators and amplifiers he had assembled in the garden shed from old equipment bought from a military surplus store. "I spent day after day, and a lot of nights, huddled in front of it," he said. "This was the first computer in the world in a private house."

The set-up was "incredibly cumbersome and primitive" but it enabled him to compose such works as Partita for Unattended Computer, which he performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1968. It was, he claimed, "the first real-time performance on stage of any electronic music not using tape." The programmes for the show were covered in foil so the audience could participate by rustling them. It was the 1960s, after all.

By 1969 Zinovieff had begun commercially marketing the VCS3 synthesizer through his Electronic Music Studios (EMS) company, under the slogan "Think of a sound - now make it". At a cost of £3,000, its selling point was that it was compact and portable in comparison to the huge modular Moog system. At one point Robert Moog offered to sell out to EMS for $100,000, but Zinovieff turned down the deal.

The VCS3 made a spectacular contribution to the development of popular music in the 1970s but Zinovieff was no businessman. By the end of the decade as the bigger manufacturers entered the market, EMS had gone bust. His workshop was sold to the National Theatre but was never put back together as a working studio. Placed in storage, the equipment was subsequently destroyed by a flood.

He spent thirty years working variously as a graphic designer and a teacher, although he continued to dabble in electronics, most notably on a piano-sampling project with Sir Clive Sinclair.

He returned to composing in his late Seventies, creating new works with the poet Katrina Porteous and the violinist Aisha Orazbayeva, several of which were broadcast on BBC Radio 3. It led to a revival of interest in his earlier work, a selection of which was released in 2015 on the compilation album Electronic Calendar - The EMS Tapes.

Asked where his inspiration came from, he said: "My wonderful head full of wild things bursting out and having to be tamed. Lots of people would say, 'Oh, this is too daring'. But I've never felt that. Perhaps because I'm Russian, I'm not afraid of going too far."

Peter Zinovieff, composer and synthesizer pioneer, was born on January 26, 1933. He died after a fall at his home on June 23, 2021, aged 88