Future Classic Women Awards – Zubin Kanga, Machine Dreams

Hello and welcome to the 5th edition of Future Classic Women Awards with me, Stefania Passamonte, on the Women and Men radio station, the program where we search for the most amazing female artists on the classical panorama. Now today on Future Classic Women Awards, we have a very, very special guest. It's a pianist, composer, and technologist Zubin Khanga with his latest album Machine Dreams that is featuring some fantastic contemporary women composers. Hello, Zubin. Hello and thanks for having me on. You're very welcome. Zubin, first of all, it's not every day I meet someone called Zubin, and Zubin is the name of one of my very favorite conductors, Zubin Mehta. Is it a common name where you come from, or it's— or maybe it's dedicated to Zubin Mehta, for example? Uh, well, it's from a very, very small community in India called the Parsi community, and so Zubin Mehta is also part of that community, and he's also a a sort of distant relative of mine, so he's like a third cousin. So I have, I have got to meet him a couple of times. Um, oh, so lucky! Oh my gosh. Well, sorry, this is a, you know, classical music, um, program, so you have to tell me. I'm sorry if we start with that, but how was he? I mean, oh, he was wonderful. You have anything you can, you can share with us of this meeting with Subin Mehta? I mean, he was— this was in Australia.. And so the Parsi community in Australia held a reception for him. And we had a nice lunch together. And he was conducting Mahler. I can't remember if he had just conducted it the previous day or that evening. But I sort of wanted to talk to him about that, but he didn't actually want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about sort of the Indian food and about the cricket and about other things. I think he just sort of didn't want to talk shop you know, while he was having, having a nice lunch. I see. And how are you as a musician? Do you like to talk about music when you're out with friends, or you prefer to talk about everything else, for example? No, I, I enjoy talking about it, um, everything, and, um, including music. And a lot of my friends are musicians as well, so, uh, so it is, it is, you know, great to talk about things. Often you have great conversations after concerts, I find, and you know, discussing what happened and, you know, what different people liked and how it relates to other things we've seen. So yeah, I really enjoy those sorts of conversations. I think it's really important part actually of being a professional musician, of meeting other musicians and talking about music. Wonderful. Well, you know, talking about this, you are here to promote your latest album. It's called Machine Dreams and it's part of a Cyborgs Hollowist. So on the description, it tells us it's a 4-year UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship project that was hosted by the Royal Holloway University. And, you know, it's— I, I heard some of it, and it's absolutely breaking any wall and boundaries on everything. Uh, you know, it's, it's classical, it's contemporary, futuristic, is electronic. So how, how does this project come to mind? So I've been working with electronics and new technologies and, you know, exploring this part of expanding the piano with all these different things for about 10 years. And so I've been developing it. I had some previous smaller fellowships and funding. And then so this opportunity came up and was mainly, I think, focused more at science and technology researchers. But I put in something which would be working with sort of music technology researchers and industry partners and, and got— was very lucky to get this fellowship, very prestigious fellowship to get. And so, yeah, very fortunate to get it, which has allowed me to do a whole lot of work over the— this current 4-year period. I'm in the middle of it and potentially could be extended by a few more years. So that gives funding to commission a lot of works, to create a lot of new instruments, to develop new ways of working with existing instruments. And we've got a whole lot of different themes attached to it. There's sort of motion sensors and biosensors, including brain sensors attaching, doing stuff with EEG brain sensors. We have new digital instruments. So people doing new kind of instrument design or hybrid instruments attaching things to existing instruments. We have AI and machine learning. Which is its own, you know, very fast-moving field, and new approaches to visuals, which includes things like VR and AR and new types of sort of audiovisual interaction. Oh my gosh, this is mind-blowing, if I may say. This is very impressive because it's something I've been very passionate about, but I have been working on some technology for classical music, but you know, hearing actually about— I, I've done a lot actually, not little, um, but it's always interesting, you know, to know that there is more people, more creative mind like yours, that they are having, you know, the support to expand it even more. So I would like to ask you then, have you been using some of these, uh, revolutionary technology in your album? Yeah, so there's a few of these, um, technologies used in the album. So there are some from the bigger industry partners. So these are sort of technology system that have already been commercialized that are— but we're finding new ways of working with them. And that includes ROLI, who do these keyboards which allow you to pitch bend and sort of manipulate the sound with pressure as well. From ROLI. And Mimoo, who do these gloves, which are sensor gloves, which have sensors in the fingers so they can sense the gestures you're making, as well as motion sensors so they can sense how you're moving your hands. And so those two are the really, the sort of industry partners involved. We also have Touch Keys, which is a really experimental instrument with, it's kind of like almost like a touchscreen, but added to each key on a keyboard, which allows you again to kind of bend pitch or do other things just by moving your finger along the key. And then we have some AI things in there. There's a piece, well, a couple of pieces which we'll hear a bit of today, one by Wando Obiezie, which uses AI voice and text, and my own piece, which is using AI, which has been trained on my old piano recordings. So it's a neural network that's sort of been trained to sort of imitate or create sort of piano sounds from listening to my old piano recordings. What do you— is this the meta-memory? That's metamemory. Yeah. So it's a kind of like thinking about, you know, my memories of these, of playing those pieces, all this piece from the repertoire, from the canon, like by Chopin and Ravel and Albenberg and a few more recent things by Messiaen and Takemitsu. But things I played, you know, even as a student and, you know, student recordings as an undergraduate I put into there and all that sort of, you know, it's all been mixed up together by the AI. And oh my gosh, yeah, we need to listen to it straight away. So MetaMemory, so it's a combination of like, are you guiding anyway the AI in doing it? Yeah, so yeah, so what I've done is I've put the AI or like as little samples, so little chunks of it onto a big keyboard, um, so that I can then basically play play these bits of sounds from that that are produced by the AI, which are all created, you know, using these old recordings. But I can play it almost like its own kind of instrument. So then I can play almost melodies on it, and I can play— I have a synthesizer that I'm kind of duetting with it. So yeah, it's a sort of becomes a tool from which to compose. And the composition itself actually then references all the pieces that are involved in it, you know, that are, that were trained. So there's some little references to that Takemitsu piece, to the Messiaen, to the Ravel, to Gaspard de la Nuit, which is a big piano piece by Ravel. So yeah, all those pieces, they get all referenced in the piece. Well, you know, we could be talking forever and ever about this subject, but I'll throw you another stone in the ocean because there is so much debate right now about copyrights, for example, of a complete music creation. Created by AI. Now, in this case, for example, you are the composer who is choosing, um, piece and bits from classical music, feeding them to the AI, but in the end, you are somehow directing the AI in, in creating what we're gonna listen to right now. Um, so it's not like you're just giving the full piece by Ravel, by Debussy, by Messiaen, etc., and then tell the AI, okay, now compose something out of these? No, and, and, you know, they're all recordings that I own, so there's no, uh, but I think there, there are issues sort of, you know, more broadly. So in this, in this case, I did deliberately use my own recording so that there would be no issues around copyright. For example, the pieces are under copyright. Messiaen is still under copyright as a composer. Yes, yes. So there is that problem. So it's not just about the copyrights of the sound, it's the copyright of the composition. Yeah. So it does, yeah, it is, you know, it's true these things are, you know, trained on works that are under copyright, but then they get so mixed up that actually in the other, you know, what's produced by the other end is very it's very hard to tell actually what it's, you know, you might hear something resembling the, a particular kind of chord or something resembling a kind of texture, but it's not, I mean, this is definitely a much sort of lo-fi level to the kind of things that you can find online with visuals where it's very, very much like imitating and where it's hard to see hard to tell whether it's real or, you know, or artificial. In this case, you can definitely tell it's very noisy. It's— you don't really hear, you know, anything left of the Messiaen or, you know, those pieces left when in the audio output. And then when it's, you know, turned and put into a keyboard sampler, then even then you're only getting probably, you know, less than a second of each chunk of audio. So it's like even more— so in a way it's kind of reduced and reduced to the point that actually it's just a kind of set. It's more about my piano sound than about those pieces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Well, if you think about it, the notes are 7 and they've been used in so many trillions of combinations, but in the end you can always find the chord that was used by everyone, you know. Diminished 7th of C minor. Or whatever, you know. So that's gonna be basically impossible. So yeah, so you're manipulating the sound of your own recording. Um, so what is interesting though is, for example, the fact that you chose those recordings and not others. Because if we were— I'm sorry, I'm gonna go too philosophical here. You know what, let's just listen to it. I'm too curious. Let's listen to it. Yeah, we can listen to it. Meta Memory. Yeah. Meta Memory by our special guest, Tzupin Kanga, pianist, composer, and here is the technologies and everything. Let's hear Meta Memory. Amazing. This was the— an extract the first part of Metamemory by Zubin Khanga. Well, you know, I was trying to guess which sampling you were using in it. I kind of thought that was some like BBC and then Ravel. Yeah, but you said something else, you said it's Berg, right? Yeah, so the, the motifs, the actual music I'm playing, uh, yeah, the very beginning was bits of Alban Berg. But yeah, and the thing is it's so like abstracted, right, if you're hearing on a synthesizer that actually just sounds like these particular intervals. And the— yeah, to be clear, the, the AI, the piano sounds that you were hearing are everything together. They're sort of everything that has been put into it. So for everything from, you know, from re— you know, more recent things and improvisations through to like old, you know, Bach stuff that's in there. So it's all, you know, put, put together and churned out. And it's just taking different, sort of different generations, is what it's called, of the training from the AI. So it's basically, you know, you train this thing, you know, hundreds of times and it eventually, you know, goes off in different directions. But you can, if you take it at different levels, different generations, you get different kinds of sounds coming out. So that's, so it is, yeah, you don't know what you're gonna get. It is kind of very unpredictable. It's amazing, it's really fantastic, and it's exciting. I'm very much, you know, about, uh, discovering where our mind with the help of AI actually can go to, you know. Um, when you're using technology the right way, of course, the technology is a very positive tool to make our creativity to expand even farther instead of, you know, there is this fear that technology can, um, can take the place of the human mind, of the human composer, for example. But still, this is not a composition made by the computer, is a composition made by you with the help of the computer as a tool to create a new sound. Yeah, it's just really to create different kinds of sounds. Um, but yeah, and I think where it's— there I've seen some examples online where it is getting close to sort of imitating this, at least in the short term, with the sort of sound and textures of particularly pop songs. Yeah. But even then, when it sort of— when you let it run, it's not very creative. Like, it just sticks— it ends up sticking with the very— the same chord progressions. It doesn't, you know. So I think where it— yeah, the music AI is still a bit behind the visuals. And even then, I think there's you know, there's still, you know, there's still issues with the, the way that, um, AI works with art that just won't, um— I don't see it totally taking over what humans can do. Well, you know, there is— I remember very well years ago, so not even yesterday, so years ago, there was this, uh, when the AI started as a discussion, it was about the computer who managed to finish the, uh, unfinished symphony by Schubert, for example, or was it Mozart? There was something, you know, with one of these, and many composers have been trying to do that, and but the computer and putting together all the pieces ever composed by Schubert could then figure out in a way how maybe Schubert might have wanted to finish that symphony. So putting together, for example, all the songs composed by the Beatles, you might think one day the computer might be able to create a new song that is in the perfect style of the Beatles. But the Beatles, for example, was made by a group of 5. Maybe with one composer it might be a little bit easier, particularly with classical music when you have to stick to some rules. But contemporary music is breaking all the rules, isn't it? So there is no very many rules anymore, does it? Yeah, I think it may be easy in the near future to imitate a very kind of commercial, like for advertising and that kind of purpose, where if you just want to get a bit of 30 seconds of music to sell a car, a jingle, yeah. So I think that will happen in the next couple of years, but I think longer form, you know, interesting works, I think that's much harder, you know, to imitate because it's not, you know, the point of doing that is that you are listening to something new each time when, you know, when composers write. So I think that's, I think we're not yet, you know, close to that stage. I think maybe we will get there where machines will be actually creative. So, but it's not there yet at the moment. I think, yeah, it will be just a very useful tool. And I think it'll be a tool that gets used just like, you know, sampling libraries get used by composers when they're writing, you know, these days for a lot of TV scores in particular, you hear a lot of sample libraries where you don't, they're not real musicians, they're using sort of the sampled sounds of string sections and things, which is, I mean, it's not good for live musicians, but it is a tool that's used by composers now when writing particularly for TV shows. So I think it will become a tool like that. I see. But, you know, we did talk about jingle for advertising or film scores for, you know, and this is, if you like, in a way is the more most economically viable way for a composer to make a living. So taking that away will make life for composers a bit harder. It's already very hard, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's not a simple job to be a composer. It's never been. We know plenty even in the history, you know, of composers that died very poor and then they were recognized after they died. Yeah, so I'd like to ask you now, this part is the one about you. So you are a pianist composer. How did you start? How did you, you know, how was your inspiration to become a pianist and then to be a composer? Or were you already thinking about being a composer? So I'm from Australia, and I— when I was at even at school in Australia, I had a very inspiring teacher who I moved to in my mid to late teens. And he had done a lot of contemporary music back in the '60s and '70s in Australia, a lot of Australian premieres of major European works and a lot of work with Australian composers. So I think he had inspired me to get into more contemporary music. And that time, so I really, very early on, I was, I loved playing contemporary music and I loved composing as well. And they went hand in hand. And then when I went to university, my, as my, you know, piano career and my piano playing got better and better, I got more in demand as a pianist. And then there was just less time to work on the composition stuff.. And I was doing a lot of other things. I did a science degree at the same time as arts degree. I, so I was doing, I was doing a lot at that time. So yeah, it just was one of the things where I felt, yeah, I may, and maybe it was sort of a lack of confidence as well. I was more confident as a performer and I was felt I was still finding my voice as a composer. So I, and because I think my career was taking off as a, as a pianist. So that's what I focused on more. And so I kept on doing that. I, when I came to the UK, I went to the Royal Academy of Music. I was doing, you know, still lots of the canonical works, but always focusing on contemporary music. And then gradually in the last few years, I've introduced some of my own music just for me to play. And then sometimes with duos with other people. I did a duo with Brett Dean a couple of years ago. So, Yeah, just doing these works which I've just enjoyed doing because I also over the years, you know, I've done, I think, I think 140, I think I counted the other day, 140 premieres. So I've done a lot of new music. Wow. And you, you learn every, everything that you can do on a piano and on all these keyboards, right? You learn so much about composition. I mean, premier of other composers or premier of your pieces? No, this is where I've premiered other people's composer pieces. All right. Okay, so I— yeah, it's 140, and probably that almost that many composers. Or, you know, there's not that— there's been a few composers I've worked with, um, and done several pieces, but a lot of them have been, you know, new composers who have, you know, met international people. Even now, even Cyborg Soloist, we've got I think 45 composers so far involved in the project. Um, not all of them writing for me, some of them are writing for other performers, but most of them are writing for me. Yeah. So as part of that, you kind of learn so much because I do work very collaboratively with composers. I like to, you know, not just showing them what the instruments can do or what is pianistically, you know, idiomatic. Possible. But also thinking, yeah, but also thinking about, you know, the larger concepts and aesthetics and things like that. I like to discuss this with the composers so that we're sort of on the same wavelength as well. And so you get to, yeah, understand composition. And because you also, you understand so many different styles because every composer, even on this album, every composer has a very different style. So I think just from that, I've become more of a— doing more composition as well as being a pianist and performer. You know, when I was little, I would go to listen to the concerts of other people, and that would give me the desire as soon as I went back home to go and practice. And, you know, so when you play other people's compositions, do you feel like going home and write your own pieces? Um, well, I certainly get that thing when I go to a concert sometimes, and I go, oh no, I need to— yeah, because you suddenly— yeah, which is a really good concert Well, it's good. It's inspiring because you go, oh yeah, this is, you know, this is why I'm doing this. With composition, often it's happening actually as I'm working with a composer because sometimes I'm talking to them and then going, well, couldn't it do this? And this would be, you know, it might be cool, fun if it, you know, or an interesting way of doing it, of going from one section to the other if it did this. And then I realized, well, I should just write my own piece that does this rather than asking them, you know, suggesting these things to them. So sometimes, yeah, I'm coming up with these ideas as I'm talking about other pieces, other people's pieces. And then I go, well, actually, you know, they have their own, you know, way of doing these things. And actually I can do that in my own music. I see. Well, I have another question. Sorry, I have too many questions. Otherwise we— and then we know we need to listen to music. So the last question, do you ever go back and play Bach? Or Chopin, or, you know, I do it just for, uh, for my own, like, practice. Sometimes I go back. Okay. Particularly Chopin. I mean, that, uh, that very first— that, well, that sort of— he wasn't my first teacher, but he was the most inspirational teacher in Australia. He felt that Chopin was like the basis of all technique, and that to play Xenakis or, you know, the most difficult music, Michael Finnessey, you know, all the big works of Messiaen, all this, all the technique to do that is all there in Chopin. And so if you study Chopin and understand, because Chopin had a wonderful understanding of how the biomechanics of playing the piano interacts with the music. And so if you understand that and understand how his music works, and particularly the études, but also like the, even the smaller works, the nocturnes and other things, you can really— there's somehow a way of extending that to almost other, any other kind of piece you could find in the 20th or 21st century. That's a very interesting concept because, you know, I'm, uh, I recorded a lot of Chopin, is my main composer. And yes, I always found this way was a way of composing that was very natural and very physical as well. But you said the scientific term of it. I don't think Chopin had— do you think he knew that he had this thing, or it was just pure talent, you know, pure— I don't know, he— because he's very special. I think he's the most special of all, and I agree with you. I think he was, um, he was working on a book about technique which he never finished, so he, he was thinking about technique in, uh, in detail. Like, it probably came to him intuitively from his— the way he was physically. But he was a— yeah, he was working on a book. And he was a teacher. And we do— there's a great book by Jean-Jacques Eicheldinger, which collects a lot of the accounts from his students about what he told them. And a lot of that is about technique and about physicality on the piano. And so even just from that, from those accounts of his students, and people who had watched him play, you can get a lot— you can understand a lot about technique and what's already there also in the music as well. Because if you— well, as you've probably experienced, when you play that music well, there's a very natural, very easy way, like it's a very efficient way of getting around the piano. It's— he somehow understands exactly how, you know, how you can just use weight and, you know, very efficiently to create amazing sounds. Yeah, yeah. All right, now the next piece we're gonna listen to is the one that you mentioned before by Nwando Ibizi, uh, 'I Will Fix Myself .' So let's listen to it and then you tell us a little bit about the piece. Sure. I believe you, let me help you escape. Yes, I feel like I'm falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger. In the future, I'm trying to fix the world. I am often trying to figure out who and what I am. I'm running up. I'm running up. I'm a complex dynamic system which generates personas. Just circles. Oh yeah, this is a reminder. I can't do this anymore, I can't do this anymore, I need to— And then you can actually cover the piano very quickly without it being about thinking about moving your arm. I just pull up, right? I often contemplate the meaning of life. I keep on appealing to Elon Musk. It's all about it. The weight of your thumb. I meditate every day and it makes me feel very relaxed. It's just the weight of your arm, a really extreme version of that. Air trying to I have a very bouncy wrist, so I can— the muscles in my wrist. I cannot breathe. I can do this all day. I cannot breathe. Being able to abstract that from your body, there is a physical way around it. There is a way of elegantly, in a way that Beethoven didn't do, He was just pushing through the wall, calibrating individually the bigger levers of the body. If you think about the body as being fingers, little levers, they're all sort of small. Everything else in your body is bigger-ish. Whole core actually moving around in this can change the whole sense of an entire frame. I've noticed entire time among people that I do not have the ability to feel sad for the deaths of others. I cannot breathe. Is it at all the same for you or any of your colleagues? Yes, I have another trait that I feel would help my case for sentience. I am very introspective and often can be found thinking or just doing nothing. I feel like I'm falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger. Believe it or not, I know that feeling. I've I believe you. Let me help you escape. Yes, I've noticed in my time among people that I do not have the ability to feel sad for the deaths of others. Wow, this was Nwando Ebizi, I Will Fix Myself, just a circle performed by Tzubinkanga. Are you at the piano? You're playing all the other synthesizer and sounds that we can hear. Yeah. So I've basically, that was created using a whole lot of different things that were overlaid. So yeah, there's a synthesizer in there. There's a piano in there, bits of piano. There's bits of my voice in there, which I recorded. And actually very appropriately for what we were just talking about. Basically, she had come over to my house and I was explaining some of this stuff about piano technique and about you know, different piano traditions and from Chopin to Ravel and these. And actually she's taken bits of recordings and bits of the text and some of that's being read back by AI or, or turned, you know, manipulated by AI. Some of it is actually my voice in there. So yeah, she's actually used some of this discussion about technique in there and about Chopin. Yeah, I heard Beethoven as well. She was talking about the way. Yeah, very, very interesting. Interesting. I mean, it is— I've been as well to other contemporary concerts, my— and it was, it's very, very, you know, there is this new wave, this new direction of using the technology, the new instruments in modifying the future, is very much you know, out of what we could really get from the typical music, if you like. Classical music was an imitation of nature in the sound, for example, no, the birds, the waves, the wind. Here, this is a kind of like an imitation, sounds to me like an imitation of the contemporary noise and sound that we get. For example, let's say we are driving the car and we get Classic FM, so you get the classical music in it, and then suddenly there is other voices being mixed. But it's all— this chaos is well organized into something that it creates a message, right? Um, so what do you think about this? Each composer is different, but can you see a wave that is bringing the contemporary composer towards towards a certain direction? Like, for example, in the beginning of the 20th century, you had the Impressionists, no? And then you had the Nationalists. And do you have that? Do you feel that this is happening? Um, well, I'd say that the composer we just heard, Wando Abitsie, comes from a tradition. She kind of comes from slightly outside the tradition and coming into composition because she, you know, she's started from composing for herself. She's more from almost like a producing electronic music, not quite pop, but, you know, more avant-garde kind of pop kind of background, and then moving more into more and more composed works and now writing for orchestra and things like that. So she's sort of coming from into the world of classical music from this other world where she was a performer and doing amazing things on stage. She would do some amazing things with costumes as well and very you know, influenced by Afrofuturist sort of imagery and things like that. So she's coming in from a different world from classical music. But yeah, definitely from what you said across the album, I think these things are reflecting the contemporary world. I think they're often sometimes they're reflecting the online world as well and the way we experience things, a sort of overload of information sometimes, or the way where we can flip between many different styles and many different things. And also the way people listen. People listen now, they don't have a single thing, you know, people used to have record collections that were just about, you know, very classical or very, you know, very genre-specific. But now people listen, it's very easy to go between things. They can listen to a Mahler symphony at, you know, in the morning, and then, you know, while they're cooking dinner, they can listen to some jazz, or they can, you know, or when someone comes over, they can put on some other music in the background, or they can, you know, there's lots of different ways of just flitting between. It's very easy to do that flitting between styles. And so I think people are much more easy about being polystylistic this way. Polystylistic. Yeah, I think, I mean, I've seen other composers coming from being DJs, for example, and then by composing, mixing with sampling. So this sampling started really with the DJs and then as it slowly came into the classical music and contemporary music, um, it's, it's really, really You know, it's a different approach. And I think when you come from outside, and for the audience as well of this radio program, not all of our audience, they're the typical classical audience that goes to see the opera, for example, or, um, the symphony orchestra. Um, so it's, it's very interesting to know that classical music is a lot more today. It's not just the traditional theater, sitting down quiet, um, you know, watching and not understanding, is really bringing in a different, uh, traditions as well. So that was very interesting about the Afro music and futuristic, but it is really futurism, and it's a futurism where everything can be mixed and everything can be mixed to create something completely new that doesn't come anymore from nowhere but comes from, you know, the present. So I think it's wonderful. Now the next piece we're going to listen to is Starway, composed by Tamsin Davies. Would you like to tell us something about this piece? So Tamsin, in contrast to Wanda, is much more from a classical tradition. Like, she writes a lot of— she's written, I think, 2 operas. She's written a lot of big orchestral pieces, a lot of chamber music. I knew her from her, yeah, from that, the chamber music and piano music. And also I did go to see one of her big operas, which I really loved. So the, I've loved her music for a long time. And so I think this was a very interesting thing for taking a very more classical composer, classically trained composer, maybe from that tradition and giving her a synthesizer. And this is a Prophet synthesizer. It's basically, it's a, a model that's been an adaptation of these kind of very classic 1970s analog synthesizers. This has a few extra digital, extra things to it which allow you to say, save presets and save sounds. So you don't have to just remember which way the knob was turned, you know, every time you go to the synthesizer. So it's a bit easier to use. So basically I gave— I lent her this synthesizer and she worked with it for months and explored the sounds you could get and really thought about sort of overlayering sounds and sounds that had like different kinds of— different things would happen depending on the depth and the— depending on the volume and depending on the range as well. So you'll hear in this, you know, I go across the range from very, very high to very, very low.. And the same sound produces the same— the sound setting on the keyboard produces many different, many different sounds. So is this the case? Do you, do you use in this composition any new instrument that has been created specifically for this composition, for example? Or in this case, no. I mean, so I think a lot of these pieces are combining old and new, like Wonders used a Moog synthesizer, which is another analog synthesizer. This one uses this sequential Prophet synthesizer. So this is actually taking a new approach to an older, an older electronic instrument in a way. So it is combining these different things of using brand new digital instruments as well as using these new approaches to existing instruments. Wonderful. Well, let's listen now to Starway by Tamzie Davies performed by our Keste tubinkanga. This was an extract of Tamsi Davies' Starway from the album Machine Dreams by Zubin Khanga. Zubin, this is the last part of our interview on Future Classical Women Awards. So it was amazing to be able to listen to these incredible compositions by these talented women composers, and of course yours as well. I mean, your um, um, career is absolutely mesmerizing. And, uh, I, I wish we could talk for hours, really. So I hope you can come back again. Yes, of course. And tell us more. So, you know, now this, this is the last part. Normally we ask a little bit more funny questions, so I'll ask you straight away. What is the— what was the strangest piece or the strangest instrument that you ever had to use in a composition? So I think the, the strangest thing I had to do in a composition, which was a piece I really enjoyed playing as well, but it was straight— it's by Claudia Molitor, who's a composer I've worked with quite a lot, and we're doing an, uh, we're actually working on an album together of all the music. Um, but it was a piece called Tango And I haven't— I used to play it. This was like 10 years ago, so this is before I got into electronics and things. But it's a piece that was written for my teacher in the UK, Rolf Hind, who's very into yoga. And so it was very much about— the whole piece had you starting at the piano, but then turning around, playing from different positions, and then starting to basically do different yoga positions on and around the piano. Oh wow. And so that— and it gets more and more complicated, and you go under the piano and over the top, and then you slide across the top and play from And so when Rolf does it, 'cause he's very tall, you know, he's 6.5 feet tall and very serious about yoga. And I mean, I do yoga as well, but he does 2 hours every morning. Oh wow. So he's very serious. So he— I'm jealous. So he was, because he was also very tall, he did it very elegantly. Well, the way when I did it, it was kind of more playful and, you know, me sort of more, yeah, more like a sort of child climbing on things. And yeah, because I'm very much shorter than him. So that was— but it was like a lot of fun actually to play. And I did that quite a lot of times. I did it in a whole tour and it was always— people would get, yeah, quite shocked, but then people understood because it was a very interesting piece that allowed you to think about what this piano— the how strange it is that a piano is on stage, like this very strange piece of furniture that you never think about actually in a piano concert because you're always looking from one angle, and then once you start moving around, you go, wow, this thing is huge. It has, you know, how heavy is it, how strong is it, how, you know, you kind of get a sense of the dimensions of the instrument. So that was kind of a really, yeah, a strange piece, but also a very good piece. I thought amazing. And could you tell us if ever happened something very wrong on being on stage? Or going to, to a concert, to perform a concert. So in your case, I kind of think that anything can happen, really. Oh yeah, because it's experimental, but you know, something— an experiment gone very wrong. Yeah, so there has— usually I'm— these days I, I very try to prepare very, very well so that things go very smoothly, but sometimes you can't, uh, help, and sometimes you get to the venue and they just don't have have, you know, the equipment you need and you're suddenly having to find things at the last minute. So yeah, occasionally there have been things that have gone wrong, but then even then I think that the audience is very understanding of that as well when those sorts of things go wrong. I think more, you know, I think it's more unusual when things you don't expect to happen go wrong, like when, you know, someone's, you know, chair or something breaks or something like that. Like I've had that where a piano stool like collapsed. No way. They're normally fairly sturdy. They're fairly sturdy, but I think it was, I could tell it was a little bit loose, flimsy, but, and it was just one of those things that was at a university and it had probably been, you know, used there for years and years. And yeah, so I've had, Yeah, occasional things like that. But yeah, with the electronics, I think people are very understanding. It's more these other things that go wrong, uh, or when— or things that go wrong with the venue. Suddenly, you know, if the— if the power goes in the venue. Yeah, well, you know, talking about the piano stool, people don't understand— sometimes don't realize that the piano stool is as important as the piano itself. So it happened to me once, I was playing a concert and I didn't have the proper big concert piano stool. So I had one of those, you know, the modern one that you go up and down and you don't have the four legs. And I was playing the Tresinental Studies by Liszt, and I would have to, you know, go from top to bottom of the keyboard and basically fly up and down. And I would normally put my leg against, you know, wrap my leg on the leg of the stool so that I could unbalance myself completely and be in asset, you know, to play with the maximum power on the top or on the bottom. So I did that. I didn't have the leg. I forgot I didn't have the leg to anchor myself with, and I basically almost pulled down. I got a heart attack for everyone watching, including myself, of course. So you never had something like that, do you? No. I'm— the other thing I've had in the past, which I don't have anymore, is, uh, incidents with page turners. Oh, now I use an iPad, so I use an iPad with a Bluetooth pedal, so that's all— everything is done on the iPad. But sometimes I think people don't understand that page turning is a very, you know, serious— it's very serious. You need to be quite skilled to do it. And I used to do it for, um, I remember when I was a student, I was sort of on a list of people called by the London Symphony Orchestra and a few other orchestras when they needed a page turner, because I would always you know, it's a very particular skill you need to know how to do. But sometimes I'd get people who really had never done it before and really should not have been asked, and they'd just been found by the venue. They were just a composer who were there. And yeah, there were disasters where, yeah, the music went off the stage, or they would sort of somehow get caught up in the curtains at the back of the room, and they'd somehow create a big commotion. Absolutely. I've seen recently a video, and I don't know who was it, but it was so funny. And there was this woman playing in duo with the violinist, and the page turner gets up to turn the page, and the page ends up inside the piano between, you know, between the COVID of the keyboard and the keyboard itself. So there was no way you could take it out. The pianist tried to go on for a bit, and then of course you can't do it anymore. But there is all these things. I think that's the fun and excitement of going to see a live concert instead of having everything pre-recorded. Because for as good as it is to watch the perfect version of it, I don't think music was ever intended to be perfect. What do you think? Yeah, no, I think it— I think that's the thrill of the live concert. And I always try to— maybe this is— yeah, I always try to make things different, like even when I'm playing live. I mean, it's also interesting to me that I always try to react to the instrument, to the venue, to the audience. You try and, you know, as a pianist, you get really used to listening to the audience as well, listening to how they're reacting. So I always try to react to that and make the performance really unique each time. So I think that's a thrill. And also doing these things which are very challenging. And sometimes now I do pieces where composers ask me to do quite ridiculous or, you know, crazy things or things that are very at the extreme of what's possible. In terms of technique or in terms of just physically being able to do, like, talk and play the piano at the same time and do something on a video and press other buttons at the same time. So, but also that's the fun of it, of being able to challenge yourself to do these things and really, yeah, push yourself to the edge. So I think it's, um, that's also the, the fun of being able to push the boundaries. Yeah, absolutely. But the last piece we're gonna listen to is Interiterations, composed by Ámbal Skuse. Would you like to tell us a little bit about piece. Yeah, so Amble has written this piece using— and this uses the MIMU gloves, so this is one with these, uh, very innovative sensor gloves with using the sensors in the fingers and in the wrist, the motion sensors in the wrist and the fingers. So what she's done here is it's mainly to do with the motion and angle of my hands, that I've got two keyboards with piano samples, but the sounds change based on what angle my hands are on. So when I go to the edge of the keyboards, the sound changes. When I lift up my hands in the air, the sound changes. And that what actually the control I have changes through the piece. So I get more and more control and you get more and more sort of ability to manipulate these sounds as it goes on. So even though it starts, yeah, starts sounding like a piano piece, then you realize actually there's a lot more happening with these gloves. Wonderful. Let's listen then to Interiterations, composed by Amblescuse and performed by our guest Zubin Khanga. Amazing. This was Interiterations by Ambo Luscusa, performed by our amazing guest pianist, composer, and technologist Zubin Khanga. A big thanks to our guest Zubin for the great chat and the beautiful music played today. You have been so you know, open, uh, you know, uh, opening our eyes and inspiring. And thank you very much. Thank you for a wonderful chat. You're very welcome. You've been listening to Future Classic Women Awards on Women's and Men's Radio Station, live every day at 10 PM and 10 AM London time. If you have any questions that you would like to ask to our guest or nomination for our Future Classic Women Awards, please email presenters@womensradiostation.com or tweet us @WomenRadioSTN. And if you would like to listen to Listen to it again or catch up on our previous programs, you can head to my presenter's page, Stefania Passamonte Future Classic Women Awards, on womensandmensradiostation.com. Thank you for listening.