Zygmund de Somogyi’s music beguiles with its wit, emotional openness, and sonic imagination. Their name first came to my attention when I heard Pixelhead for violin and harpsichord (2022), a deliberately unsettling, uncanny piece that completely blows away any Baroque preconceptions you might have about this instrumental combination. Indeed, their musical background is in the punk/alternative music scenes, and their current work is very much rooted in contemporary culture. Zyggy is also a founder of the online contemporary music magazine Prxludes, a forum for emerging musicians and composers.
Two premieres by the composer, quarter-life crisis (synth étude) and IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY, were at the heart of a Wigmore Hall concert in London on 19 April. This programme, titled Music for the Quarter-Life Crisis, was performed by the young ensemble Temporal Harmonies Inc. (Lydia Walquist, flute; Mikołaj Piszczorowicz, cello; Xiaowen Shang, piano) alongside music by Caroline Shaw, Lowell Liebermann, Ashkan Layegh and the sadly-missed Kaija Saariaho. The concert showcased the breadth of de Somogyi’s compositional voice, from the unexpected and funny mash-up of virtuoso piano gestures and a bedroom-musician-style singer-songwriter in synth étude, to a four-movement epic where the instrumentalists were up for anything the composer threw at them.
Zyggy currently participates in the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Composers programme and is a fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. They recently discovered a passion for opera and more broadly, storytelling through music and a collaborative ethos. Introducing the Wigmore Hall programme from the stage, they evoked the challenges facing young people in this difficult and ever-changing world, but also stressed that we can create hope through resistance, solidarity and community-building.
Congratulations on your Wigmore Hall debut! What informs your programming decisions for a concert of this type?
Thank you so much! This is the first time I’ve co-curated a concert framed by my own compositions, and I’m so incredibly grateful to the Royal Philharmonic Society and Wigmore Hall Learning for providing me with this opportunity.
When I first brought in my close collaborators and friends — Temporal Harmonies, Inc. — to put this programme together, many of our discussions revolved around how to create a concert that resonated with our own lived experiences as young(ish!) people living in 2025. At the onset of what we jokingly referred to as the Twenty-First Century’s “quarter life crisis” — which eventually titled the programme — we tapped into the feelings of exhaustion, overwhelm, frustration, and anxiety about the dark path our world is headed in; and paired two new works of mine with stylistically disparate pieces, written within our lifetimes, that reflected a lot of our pertinent feelings at the time.
Through the experience of co-curating this concert, I’ve come to realise my approach to programming mirrors my approach to composition. I like to create a kind of stylistic eclecticism around myself; spaces where genre and aesthetic boundaries are blurred, juxtaposed, and often shattered entirely. New music is such a “massive tent,” as Sam Rudd-Jones puts it — while everyone of course has aesthetic preferences and biases, I don’t understand why we should limit ourselves stylistically in our programming. We all listen to a huge variety of music, especially outside of classical music — I think a bit of challenging eclecticism can only be a good thing.
You have benefitted from opportunities such as the RPS Composers programme: how does this type of scheme contribute to the development of emerging composers?
Being on the RPS Composers programme this year has been absolutely integral to my development as a composer. I’m sure many composers have felt this “lull” — particularly after education — like the momentum you’ve built up while studying suddenly falls out from under you, and you’re not sure where to go next. Particularly in the UK, schemes like the RPS Composers programme are pivotal in nurturing the next generation of composers — providing us with vital professional development and real-world experience, in an industry that academic systems sadly can’t truly prepare us for.
Alongside a commission — mine being for Wigmore Hall Learning, for which I composed the concert opener music for the quarter-life crisis (synth étude) and closer IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY — the RPS also provides a year of professional development and mentorship. We’ve had meetings with professional composers, commissioning bodies, venues, publishers, and more, providing guidance on navigating the music landscape as a professional composer — guidance that’s absolutely vital at this stage of our careers.
I’m very grateful to be on this creative journey alongside some incredible UK-based composers — including some friends I’m blessed to be close to. Recently, I travelled to Portsmouth to watch the premiere of ‘an sgaireag: she screams’ by fellow RPS composer Lisa Robertson — a gorgeously dramatic work performed stunningly by The Hermes Experiment; and a number of RPS composers also came to our concert at Wigmore Hall. It feels like such a supportive community.
I loved IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY – it had a strong emotional impact and was superbly written for the flute, cello, and piano ensemble. Tell us about what motivated the piece and how you worked with Temporal Harmonies Inc.
The principal inspiration for IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY was a YouTube video created by themaininyourcomputer, which I discovered at around 3am on a September evening. That video — a small snapshot into someone else’s world, cutting through the anonymity of the internet and the cynicism of an overstimulated, meaning-starved social media generation — struck such a chord with me. As one commenter puts it, “it’s such a gift to be alive in the time of these little slices of others’ experience of life.”
I guess IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY ended up being a very personal piece of mine for much the same reason. The four movements of the work frame four vignettes of my emotional headspace around the turn of 2025, taking their titles from indie video game Fear and Hunger 2: Termina (‘Moonscorched’), an in-joke at a reunion with old school friends (‘Madeleine, Mortlake’), a Motion City Soundtrack song (‘Together We’ll Ring In the New Year’), and the aforementioned YouTube video for the final movement (‘IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY’).
For me, IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY is in essence about empathy: the capacity for human connection, despite everything that divides us. I couldn’t have written anything at this scale without the incredible contributions of Temporal Harmonies, Inc.: there’s so much love, trust, and connection that had to be in place for me to compose for Lydia, Xiaowen, and Miki in this way, using everything at their disposal — including their voices in the piece’s final movement. Maybe I’m hopelessly naïve — but I do believe that empathy can save the world, if we give it a chance.
A lot of your work has a strongly theatrical dimension, including your instrumental pieces. How is storytelling important to you?
In a lot of ways, theatricality and storytelling are at the heart of what I’m doing compositionally. I was a theatre-maker and performer with theatre organisation Mushmoss Collective for two years; and since starting to compose in 2019, I’ve found myself gravitating towards opera and music theatre — my second opera URSA MINOR, with librettist Alexia Peniguel, premiered in London last June.
Fundamentally, I find the most joy in music’s power to build worlds, tell stories, and expand perspective(s). I’ve always used music as a way to express myself in a way I couldn’t with words. I’d say I employ an emotionally-driven approach to composition; while I have a deep respect for a lot of composers who predominantly work with “formalist,” or process-derived techniques, I’ve struggled to truly connect with that school of music-making. Perhaps that comes from my musical background: I didn’t grow up performing or connecting with classical music, and spent much of my teenage years and early twenties playing in punk bands.
Most recently, I’ve become interested in creating emotional moments through playing around with narrative structures, or our expectations of narrative structure. I’m indebted to Tom Drayton — a researcher in metamodernism and theatre, and lecturer at UEL — who showed me Poltergeist Theatre’s Lights Over Tesco Car Park: a participatory play about aliens that’s slightly absurd but so unbelievably heartfelt. Art that’s sort of self-aware but all the more sincere and powerful for it. That’s something I feel like I’m just starting to explore in my instrumental music, with IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY being a step in that direction — and I’m so excited to further explore this facet of my practice, both in my instrumental work and more “overtly” theatrical pieces.
What do you think the new music world could do to make itself more accessible to neurodiverse musicians and composers?
I’m aware I’m coming at this with a degree of privilege, as I’m currently not living in a country where my life and very existence is under threat — but I think there’s a couple points I can make.
Firstly: when we ask for access needs, listen to us. While it’s commendable to see the wonderful steps some music organisations have taken to accommodate us, to second-guess what we might need without consulting us first can be anything from counterproductive to downright patronising and condescending.
It’s pivotal that these same music organisations give us the confidence to ask for these needs without fear of judgement. I’ve certainly been in situations where I’ve not felt comfortable expressing my own needs for fear of “rocking the boat,” or being perceived as “difficult” — and I’m aware that sometimes, organisations can find these conversations awkward, perhaps for fear of getting it “wrong.” But as my good friend Rylan Gleave once said: it’s much more productive to just reach out and ask about things, even if you get it wrong (we’re grateful to be approached!), than to stay silent. Inclusivity isn’t just getting us into a space: it’s learning how to give us the resources and nurturing to thrive the same as everyone else.
It’s a very scary time, across the world, for people who share some of my characteristics and lived experiences — as an autistic person, a queer person, a person of colour. I’m so grateful to groups and organisations such as Paraorchestra, Drake Music, and (in my case) the RPS and Wigmore Hall Learning for providing that environment for the artistic community around me. It’s so important now more than ever for the organisations we work with to create, with outward confidence, the conditions for us to thrive and be our most authentic selves.
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