Reinventions: Peter Zinovieff – Katrina Porteous – Tom Hall

by Tom Hall and Katrina Porteous

The premier of an exciting new surround sound composition in tribute to Peter Zinovieff by two of his collaborators and personal friends. This work will draw on some of Zinovieff’s compositional techniques, rare archive recordings of his voice, and recorded and live voice from his long-time collaborator, poet Katrina Porteous.

Under the Ice

By Peter Zinovieff and Katrina Porteous 

A rare chance to hear Peter Zinovieff’s final composition, a collaboration between computer and live voice with poet Katrina Porteous. Under the Ice takes the audience on an astonishing 30-minute journey to the unseen worlds beneath Antarctica’s frozen surface – vast mountains, valleys, lakes and volcanoes, landscapes more difficult to visit than outer space – and reflects on the continent’s crucial role in Earth’s changing climate. Commissioned by Northumbria University’s NUSTEM and focusing on the remote sensing technologies used to explore these hidden worlds, Zinovieff and Porteous worked on this piece until Zinovieff’s final illness. Zinovieff’s haunting electronic composition is derived from real sound sampled from Antarctic glaciers.

Biographies

Dr Peter Zinovieff (1933-2021) is a central figure in British electronic music. His importance is as the co-founder of the EMS synthesizer manufacturer in the late 1960-70s (used by Pink Floyd and many other bands), as a pioneer of computer music (with his private computer studio EMS from 1966), and as someone who made collaborations with celebrated modernist classical composers, including Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze. In the last decade of his life he returned to composition, producing important collaborations with the violinist Aisha Orazbayeva (Our 2011), cellist Lucy Railton (RFG, 2016) and with Katrina Porteous.

Katrina Porteous is a Northumbrian poet who worked with Zinovieff throughout the last decade of his life, a collaboration which resulted in poetry and music for six important compositions. She is currently an IAS Fellow at the University of Surrey, working with Dr Tom Hall to make definitive recorded versions of these works. Porteous has published four collections with Bloodaxe Books, most recently Rhizodont (shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize and winner of the 2025 Laurel Prize for environmental poetry). Her work has been set by many composers, including Trevor Wishart (2021), Kristina Arakelyan (BBC Proms 2023) and Gavin Higgins (Aldeburgh 2025).

Tom Hall is a UK-based Australian composer, performer and writer on music with interests in both acoustic and live electronic music. Tom Hall’s musicological work is centred on aspects of early tape, electronic and UK computer music, including the work of Peter Zinovieff and has been published by MIT and Cambridge University presses and others. In 2019 Tom organized a ‘Peter Zinovieff Day’ symposium with Zinovieff at the University of Surrey. Other research interests encompass the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman, including works involving technology. He is currently Programme Director for the BMus (Hons) degree in Creative Music Technology in Music and Media at the University of Surrey.