How I create… with pianist Zubin Kanga

For over a decade Zubin Kanga has been at the forefront of creating, curating and performing groundbreaking interdisciplinary works that explore and redefine how musicians can interact with new technologies.

Led by a simple question, ‘what is the future of the piano?’, the Australian-born London resident has plunged fearlessly into the unknown. His explorations and commissions on this theme have included Laura Bowler’s SHOW(ti)ME for speaking pianist, MiMU gloves, live video and live electronics, Alexander Schubert’s Steady State which uses brain sensors attached to the performer to control video, light and sound and Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987 which employed a KeyScanner to enable the piano to type live text onto a screen.

In October 2024 Kanga appeared here at the Southbank Centre for After Dark, a performance of three works – his own Hypnagogia (after Bach), Tansy Davies’ Star-Way and Alex Groves’ Dance Suite – from his Cyborg Soloists project which explores interdisciplinary interactions between music, the other arts and new digital technologies.

When and where do you find yourself at your most creative?

I’m most creative when I’m at an instrument – it’s obviously the best place to explore creative approaches to interpretation, but I also find that when composing, I use a combination of abstract and improvisational approaches to working out ideas. It’s also just been a kind of ‘office’ for me as a pianist for my whole professional life; even at home, the piano is right next to my work computer so I’m rarely more than a few steps away.

How do you know when an idea is worth developing into something more?

When I’m on a roll, I get into an intense mode of concentration that I instinctively know is producing good material. It can take a lot of preparation and persistence to reach that point (especially working out the specific soundworld and functionality of a digital instrument – effectively ‘building’ the specific version of the instrument for that work), but then it flows very quickly. However I think the real creative process starts after this, when examining the material afresh and editing and trying to be objective in examining what material (or central idea or concept) is worth keeping, and then honing and polishing it into the work.

In some cases it’s about the instrument or technology – with my piece Hypnagogia (after Bach) the work came out of experiments with the MiMU gloves (using them to control live sound from the piano) as well as experiments with the sounds and arpeggiator mode of the Korg Prologue synthesiser. Combining both of these around the final movement of Bach’s St Matthew Passion (which has its own history of transformations in contemporary music, including by David Lumsdaine) I found a core for the work – material from the past that could be transformed with these futuristic sounds and technologies.

Which tools are key to your creative process?

As a performer and a composer, the creative process has many similarities. The eraser (whether physical or virtual, on the iPad or laptop) is the most useful tool, and a big part of working with living composers on new works is being flexible and willing to change direction rapidly – even rewriting whole passages of the work together to be more idiomatic, practical or effective on the instrument. The tools to record myself (audio and video) are always crucial for my creative process as this allows me to assess my performance from the outside, and when composing I can record myself improvising, which is often the basis of my musical ideas.

Who are you creating your work for, and how free are you to create the work you want to create?

I’m always mindful of audiences and their response to the work – when commissioning or composing, I always want audiences to be engaged and to be able to enjoy the work on some level. Some works that are incredibly sophisticated in their use of electronics or other technologies are just not that impressive to the audience, as it’s all happening behind a laptop so they can’t perceive what’s being created live and what is prerecorded. How audiences engage with and understand the technology is as important to me as the technology itself. I don’t feel at all restricted by this, and I’ve worked with composers across the artistic spectrum – it’s just a useful frame of reference for all creators to keep in mind.

How do you stay disciplined, and dedicated to your work?

My challenge at the moment is the amount of juggling I’m doing. Running my major UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship research project, Cyborg Soloists, which is exploring interactions between music and AI, new digital instruments, new audio-visual interactions and bio-sensors. Undertaking the research, managing the project (including more than 90 collaborators), doing all the required admin, as well as actually performing a lot of the research outputs (alongside other administrative and teaching responsibilities at the university) means that I am constantly busy, and need to be disciplined in prioritising the time to practice and create. 

I love the work that I do and know it’s an incredibly privileged position to have this opportunity to be able to commission and work with so many leading composers, so that keeps me motivated.

What do you do when you hit a wall; when you feel unmotivated or uninspired? How do you overcome this?

I’ve discovered that the key with multi-tasking is that you can’t always force your brain to change mode, especially when switching from administrative to creative work. Changing to another third type of work, or changing scenery and going to work in a café, will often flick the switch and allow ideas to flow. It also takes time to get into the right mode for really deep creative work – it’s a mode at odds with juggling lots of tasks, and scheduling these longer sections of the day for deep work is crucial for a lot of projects.

Who do you look to for feedback?

With new works, the most important feedback I get is from the composer themselves. It’s often a mutual coaching environment, where I give feedback on the work, from both an aesthetic and technical perspective, and they give feedback on my interpretation. These shared discussions of the work often become as important as the score in preparing the work for performance. 

And with successive works, a rapport and shared language develops between composer and performer – Schiller’s Piano is the third collaboration between me and Laurence Osborn, and each time we’ve found it easier to both understand each other’s artistic intentions, and to work together on the technical questions to push the instruments (piano and keyboard) to new virtuosic heights.

How different is your creative process now to when you first began as an artist?

I’m much more mindful and efficient in the way I work, especially when learning a piece. I used to throw myself at a piece with a lot of mechanical practice, but I now think much more carefully about the relationship between technique, sound, interpretation and the larger musical context. Working with tech also helps with this, as I need to be thinking about the wider audio-visual experience beyond the mechanics of playing the piano.

What does success feel like?

Like a lot of artists I know, I get very critical of my own work and the work I’m involved in, and it’s rare that I’m completely satisfied with any project after it’s done. But I’ve also learned to enjoy these milestone performances, as well as the journey there – it’s a privilege to be in my position, and the whole point of working in contemporary music is taking risks and experimenting with new approaches, rather than staying in any safe zone. 

And with a bit of distance I find I’m able to look at the works and see the true significance of them – works written for me by Alexander Schubert, Philip Venables, Laura Bowler, Nicole Lizée, Oliver Leith, Claudia Molitor, Tansy Davies, Alex Paxton, Laurence Osborn, and many others that are not just technically groundbreaking, but artistically masterful.

Is there a piece of advice you’ve received that you often find yourself returning to?

John Davis, the former head of the Australian Music Centre, gave me some great advice many years ago after a performance I gave of 10 newly commissioned Australian works. He talked about how much he enjoyed the diversity of styles at the concert, but asked ‘where are you in this project?’. Finding my own personal identity as a performer, and being able to curate and co-create this onstage through my choices of composers, themes and technologies, has been really important to me, and my compositional identity is just an extension of this.

What’s the most recent thing you learned about yourself through your work?

Perhaps it’s the nature of pianists, but I always feel I should be ‘doing more’ in a piece – playing mountains of notes and doing virtuosic acrobatics is so much a part of both the piano repertoire and the culture of pianists. I lost that youthful desire for virtuosity for its own sake some time ago, but recently I premiered a new piece by Alexander Schubert which was for brain sensor controlling sound and video, Steady State. It pushed me to a new extreme of doing a lot with very little – just speaking text, using a motion sensor-controlled ‘mimed’ piano, and using the brain sensors to control the video and sound (standing or sitting with little movement besides turning my head), but with the right sense of theatre and presentation, I realised that doing very little can be incredibly compelling. 

I still play a lot of very virtuosic music (including Laurence Osborn’s new concerto, Schiller’s Piano) but I’ve also learnt how to deliver a powerful performance just through the control of the tiniest of movements.

How do you know when you’re done?

In my view, musical works (whether my own or those I’m co-creating or performing) are never ‘complete’. They’re living networks of relationships between scores, creative contributors, performances, recordings and a growing body of knowledge around the works. For me, music is never ‘done’. It might be concretised at particular moments – as a score or recording – but as long as it is still being played, examined or thought about, it remains alive and changing.