Zinovieff bought his first computer from the proceeds gained from auctioning his first wife's tiara. It raised £4,000 (equivalent to £80,000 in 2021). He used this computer to control an array of oscillators and amplifiers he had bought from an army surplus store. He claimed that "This was the first computer in the world in a private house". 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. It was marketed as being more portable than the huge Moog system, and at one point Robert Moog offered to sell out to EMS for one million dollars. Zinovieff turned down this deal. In 1968, Zinovieff's computer music system featured in several pioneering events in London. In January, the
First London concert of Electronic Music by British composers event was held at the
Queen Elizabeth Hall. Alongside pieces by Delia Derbyshire and
Tristram Cary, the concert included the premiere of Zinovieff's
Partita for Unattended Computer, the first ever unaccompanied performance of live computer music, with no human performer involved, and the piece read from
paper tape. The programmes were covered in foil so the audience could participate by rustling them. Later that year, as part of
Cybernetic Serendipity, the first UK international exhibition devoted to the relationship between the arts and new technology at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts, Zinovieff and his team created a computer system, based on the PDP-8, which could analyse a tune whistled by a visitor to the show and improvise upon it. In the same year, part of the studio was also 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 Richard 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". In a 2019 interview Zinovieff commented on EMS as a business: "It's always been a problem with me because I don't like synthesizers. So this side of EMS was never interesting to me, it was always the studio. The basic purpose of EMS was to finance the studio, but unfortunately that's not what happened. EMS got bigger and bigger and we made more and more products and it took up more time. And instead of making money, it started to lose it. In the end, when EMS went bankrupt, it pulled the studio down." Throughout his career, Zinovieff often worked in collaboration. These include
Chronometer (1971–2) which features recordings of the ticking of
Big Ben and the chimes of
Wells Cathedral clock. and also the words for
Nenia: The Death of Orpheus (1970). He also worked with
Hans Werner Henze, and the section ''Tristan's Folly
in Tristan'' (1975) included a tape by Zinovieff. After EMS ran into financial difficulties in the mid 1970s, Zinovieff closed his Putney studio, which was sold to the
National Theatre, but never put back together as a working studio. His equipment was put into storage, and later destroyed in a flood.). His cottage had no mains electricity supply and he powered his remaining synth equipment from batteries hooked up to a windmill.
Activity as a composer (20102021) 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. Following these projects, Zinovieff continued to work primarily as a composer for the remaining years of his life. His work during this time combined sounds from live instrumentation and field recordings and continued his long-term interest in
computer music and spatial multi-channel performance setups. He also continued to work mainly in collaboration during this time. The first piece,
Horse (2011), was broadcast on
BBC Radio 3. Subsequent works with Porteous were 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. Zinovieff's collaboration with cellist
Lucy Railton, entitled
RFG, An album version was released as
RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer on
PAN in 2020. A retrospective compilation covering Zinovieff's work in the EMS era, including collaborations with Hans Werner Henze and Harrison Birtwistle, was compiled by musician
Pete Kember and released in 2015. Between the years 20132017, Zinovieff composed an extended computer work, entitled
South Pacific Migration Party, derived from
hydrophone recordings of
blue whales recorded by British oceanographer Susannah Buchan off the coast of
Chile and originally proposed and then curated by Andrew Spyrou. As its premiere, a preliminary
quadraphonic mix of the piece was played in
Athens as part of
documenta 14 in June 2017, followed by a presentation of the piece during the
UN Ocean Conference, at
The Explorers Club, New York City, the same month. Subsequently, a full
b-format rendering of the piece was commissioned by TBA21, and presented at the TBA21-Augarten
ambisonic sound space in
Vienna, during the exhibition
Tidalectics. An 8-track reduction, designed for two separate quadraphonic systems, was presented at the
Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, in October 2017. The piece was released on the record label The Association for Depth Sound Recordings on 30 July 2021. == Awards ==