Zubin Kanga on his revolutionary method to new expertise by his interdisciplinary musical programmes

Alexander Schubert: Regular State – world premiere 7 Might 2024 – Zubin Kanga at Nationwide Live performance Corridor, Dublin (Picture: Roisin Murphy O’Sullivan)

Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga is thought for each his championing of up to date music in addition to his revolutionary interdisciplinary musical programmes, exploring what it means to be a performer by interplay with new applied sciences. Zubin has a busy Autumn lined up with 4 world premières by Laurence Osborn, Alex Groves, Alex Ho and Claudia Molitor, plus a efficiency of Regular State, a ground-breaking work by Alexander Schubert which expands Zubin’s use of latest applied sciences.

Zubin Kanga (Picture: Raphael Neal)

On 10 October Zubin will premiere Laurence Osborn’s piano concerto, Schiller’s Piano with the Manchester Collective in a programme entitled Fever Goals on the Royal Northern Faculty of Music, repeating the programme on the Southbank Centre on 12 October. Osborn’s work requires Zubin to play each the piano and a keyboard controlling samples. These samples are all sounds that Osborn recorded within the Southbank Centre’s piano workshop the place the centre’s pianos are restored and sorted. Thus Osborn has captured the sound of various elements being restored, together with visceral sounds from the within of the piano.

The work is impressed by Osborn seeing a duplicate of Schiller’s piano. In 1942 the furnishings in Friedrich Schiller’s home in Weimar was changed by replicas, with the originals saved underground. The replicas have been made by prisoners in Buchenwald, and when it got here to the piano they copied the skin solely, it was unable to play music. This reproduction piano is now at Buchenwald, and in writing Schiller’s Piano, Osborn has responded to fascism’s empty makes an attempt to recreate the previous. Osborn got here to Zubin with the idea for the piece and the 2 have been in frequent contact as Osborn was writing it. Zubin describes Osborn as writing virtuosic piano music, so there have been sensible concerns associated each to the physicality of enjoying two keyboards and the timing of the sounds from the completely different sound worlds. There have been loads of technical intricacies they usually spent six months engaged on the piece, and after I chatted to Zubin they have been nonetheless engaged on particulars.

The sort of collaboration with the composer is what Zubin at all times does with a brand new work. He likes collaborating and feels that it’s good for the performer to be a part of the creation course of and in reality, wrote his PhD on the subject! When working with new expertise this turns into much more vital, particularly as they could have to get recommendation in regards to the expertise itself.

The concerto was commissioned by Zubin Kanga and Manchester Collective as a part of Cyborg Soloists, Zubin’s multi-year undertaking at Royal Holloway College of London which is exploring working with new expertise. As a part of Cyborg Soloists, Zubin has a number of technological companions enabling him to work with a wide range of new applied sciences. On the Aldeburgh Competition this Summer season he performed an instrument with hexagonal keys with a 31-note microtonal scale, and he moderately dryly commented that he wanted time to study the instrument. There’s at all times new expertise coming alongside and Zubin has to not solely bodily study to play the brand new instrument however discover ways to make it work in a musical context.

Reproduction of Schiller’s piano in Buchenwald’s exhibition Ostracism and Violence 1937 to 1945 (Picture: Katharina Model, Assortment Buchenwald Memorial)

An instance of his revolutionary method is his espousal of expertise developed for medical functions. At hcmf// (Huddersfield Modern Music Competition) on 18 November, Zubin will carry out Alexander Schubert’s Regular State which options the world’s first decision-based use of mind sensors to manage music and video. For the work, Zubin is connected to an EEG cap measuring dominant resonant frequencies within the visible cortex. These sensors utilise a function of the mind understood and utilized by neurologists, that if we watch a flashing gentle, the identical velocity might be detected in the back of the mind. That is used to manage prosthetic and language software program, however on this case, they’re placing the information into music software program. Although the expertise has been round for some time, they needed to develop the efficiency utilization from scratch.

In efficiency, Zubin could have a hologram display screen in entrance of him with issues flashing at completely different speeds on the display screen, relying on the place he seems, this controls what occurs, and there’s a suggestions loop whereby what occurs impacts what’s on the display screen. He describes the primary a part of the brand new work as akin to a scientific or science-fiction experiment, and this contains an evidence for the viewers, whereas the second half is extra free-form.

The subsequent day at hcmf//, Zubin will premiere Alex Ho’s Cyborg Etudes in a programme that additionally contains Claudia Molitor’s In Den Träumen and Alex Paxton‘s Automobile-Pig. Ho’s piece makes use of a hoop sensor which is a 3D sensor which Zubin has used earlier than and he has additionally used glove sensors. The sensor detects the place on the piano his hand is, and what his hand is doing, and thus his hand place controls delays which have an effect on the sound and the stay video, thus responding to what Zubin’s hand is doing. The result’s stay results, with the results being fastidiously chosen, and simply as with enjoying the piano, the sound will change every time he performs the piece. He feels that this makes Ho’s work moderately nearer to working with stay electronics, and he’s attempting to get away from one thing too mounted like an electronics observe within the background. Additionally, the ring makes the efficiency extra theatrical because the performer controls every little thing with a way of theatre, versus performances which use a second particular person merely controlling the stay electronics from a laptop computer together with the stage.

With each the Ho and the Schubert, there may be an old style sense of theatre to Zubin’s method, and quite a lot of his performances are in regards to the physicality of efficiency, and he’s attempting to get again to that sense of embodied sound. So, moderately than disembodied electronics alongside his bodily keyboard enjoying, the brand new expertise allows him to offer the phantasm of embodied sound, the digital sound connects to bodily gesture. Even Osborn’s concerto has a standard ingredient, as for Zubin it’s nonetheless a piano concerto, albeit one with an additional instrument.

After Zubin’s Southbank Centre efficiency of Laurence Osborn’s concerto, Zubin will give a solo set After Darkish, that includes Tansy Davies’ Star-Means, his personal piece Hypnagogia (after Bach) and the world première of Alex Groves’ DANCE SUITE. Groves’ piece is described as ‘a microcosm of queer courting, dance flooring, social lives and the function that music has to play in that scene – as a gathering area, place of launch, abandonment and connecting with queer folks’. Zubin describes it because the sounds you would possibly hear in a nightclub together with Groves’ personal variations of music from digital albums, so acquainted however with a twist, all performed on keyboards.

Zubin will likely be enjoying DANCE SUITE on a Roli Seaboard, which Zubin describes as a keyboard the place the keys are so you may transfer your hand throughout, up and down and every motion impacts the pitch and timbre. He provides moderately strikingly that you just get these results by ‘kneading’ the instrument. The expertise and the instrument have been round for a while however not utilized in a lot in classical music, nonetheless, Zubin has integrated its use into a few of his tasks as a part of Cyborg Soloists.

Zubin is Senior Lecturer in Musical Efficiency and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway, College of London, and Cyborg Soloists, his multi-year music and analysis undertaking, is funded by the £1.4 million UK Analysis and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. Most of those fellowships are in science and expertise and when he was awarded his grant in 2020, his undertaking was certainly one of solely three to be awarded to a music-focused undertaking out of 481 fellowships. Cyborg Soloists was established to discover the interdisciplinary interactions between music, the opposite arts and new digital applied sciences, utilizing Zubin’s earlier tasks from 2015-2020 – Darkish Twin, Cyborg Pianist and Piano Ex Machina – as the idea for large leaps ahead in how musicians work with expertise.

So Cyborg Soloists includes creating new works, but in addition involving artistic companions and trade companions to discover new avenues, new devices and new applied sciences, using AI and new approaches. Zubin describes it as an incredible alternative and it has allowed him to fee round 50 items involving an enormous variety of new applied sciences. Laurence Osborn’s Schiller’s Piano is without doubt one of the greatest tasks up to now. However there’s a big-ness to Alexander Schubert’s piece additionally, because it includes Zubin and two assistants, in addition to having been years within the making owing to the complexity of the expertise.

Different works included Philip Venables‘ Reply Machine Tape, 1987 which used a keyboard scanner with typed textual content on a display screen, involving the primary use of a tool developed by Professor Andrew McPherson of Imperial Faculty and Augmented Devices Laboratory. Then there was an enormous piece by Neil Luck which was written with a deaf efficiency artist, with Zubin utilizing sensor gloves to imitate the gestures of the efficiency artist and create sounds. Having damaged floor with these varied applied sciences, Zubin hopes that others will use them and that the fruits of Cyborg Soloists will likely be an arsenal for composers and performers to attract up.

Zubin Kanga (Picture: Raphael Neal)

Zubin educated as a classical pianist, learning at College in Australia the place he was concerned in performing modern music by college students, but in addition performing huge works from the piano canon from Bach’s Goldberg Variations by to Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Then coming to the UK, he studied on the Royal Academy of Music the place he had two academics, pianist and composer Rolf Hind, and pianist Kathryn Stott. He carried out a variety of music, all on the piano, together with a large exploration of prolonged methods together with works by George Crumb. He additionally commissioned quite a lot of music.

However he felt that he reached the top of what prolonged methods on the piano might give, and in 2013/14 determined to do a complete recital utilizing electronics, this was Darkish Twin. He was amazed at the way it expanded what was potential in efficiency. His continued tutorial work, basing his analysis on items he was doing and his grant for Cyborg Soloists was the logical extension to this, utilizing expertise to push past what is feasible on a piano.

All of the items this Autumn are notated, even the Alexander Schubert, although in Alex Ho’s piece, a number of the gestures are as much as Zubin, and naturally, they should discover a notation for the brand new devices. He nonetheless performs Chopin, Ravel and Debussy for himself, however he additionally makes use of traditional repertoire to exhibit to composers, to point out that quite a lot of methods have already been explored and that it’s nice to study from the previous. As soon as the Cyborg Soloists undertaking is completed, he feels that he might return to programmes combining outdated and new, as an illustration, he as soon as created a programme pairing Elizabethan keyboard items with fashionable reinterpretations, and he finds the concept of recent items impressed by the previous moderately interesting. However he does moderately have his fingers full in the intervening time.