Zubin Kanga

Pianist, composer, and technologist Zubin Kanga is a fearless advocate of the new and unknown. For over a decade, he has been at the forefront of curating and creating interdisciplinary musical programmes which seek to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies. These include motion sensors, Artificial Intelligence, reinterpretations of cinema history, live-generated 3D visuals, virtual reality, analogue synthesizers, new interactive instruments, magnetic resonators, keyboards as video-game-style controllers, biosensors, interactions with live-video, and internet-based scores.

The combination of Kanga’s wizard like mastery of the piano and his constant hunger for experimentation has resulted in recent years in a trilogy of touring projects for piano and multimedia: Dark Twin (2015), Cyborg Pianist (2016) and Piano Ex Machina (2018-2020), and the first interactive community-based piano piece of its kind WIKI-PIANO.NET in collaboration with Alexander Schubert which, since its première in 2018, has been performed 27 times across nine-countries from major festivals to club venues.

With over 130 world premières under his belt, Kanga’s performances have been heard across the UK, Europe and Australia including at hcmf//, London Contemporary Music Festival, BBC Proms, Cheltenham Festival, Festival Présences (France), Klang Festival (Denmark), Darmstadt (Germany), Resonator Festival (Sweden), CUBE, Graz (Austria), Borealis Festival (Norway), and Melbourne and Sydney Festivals. Commissioning and co-creating new works is at the heart of his music making and Alexander Schubert, Michael Finnissy, Steve Reich, Nicole Lizée, Simon Steen-Anderson, Liza Lim, Laura Bowler, George Benjamin, Shiva Feshareki, Brett Dean, Tansy Davies, Oliver Leith, Laurence Osborne and Brett Furer are but some of the few composers he has worked with since the start of his career.

This page was last updated in June 2023.