We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Zygmund De Somogyi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Zygmund, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

Growing up, I always felt like the “problem child” of my extended family. I was a troubled kid, for sure – I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (then Asperger’s Syndrome) when I was 5, and I found communicating my own emotions and needs to be difficult, if not impossible. For the longest time, I’ve also remembered struggling with a sense of belonging; growing up in a Filipino diaspora household – while incredibly culturally fruitful – cemented in me a sort of lack of national identity. I’ve never felt truly at home in the UK, but I couldn’t consider myself entirely Filipino, either.

From both of those, I spent much of my teenage years as an introvert – terminally online. I was fortunate to spend my early teenage years in the small window of time where vBulletin forums were popular – I spent a lot of time on those. I ended up getting super invested in online folklore, internet ethnogenesis; and I ended up discovering a lot of music that reflected how I was feeling – bands like Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, The Wonder Years, Touché Amoré – music that made me feel seen, understood, for the first time in my life. It was kind of around that time that I felt this burning impulse to create art – particularly art that I felt might help others also feel this sense of belonging. I was terrible at Art in secondary school, and words/literature/poetry never really felt like my strong suit; so I gravitated towards music. Having learned piano when I was younger, I picked up singing, then bass, then guitar, and joined a number of bands between secondary school and the end of university – before gravitating towards contemporary classical music and composition in my early-mid twenties.

To get personal for a minute: I spent a lot of my teenage and uni years struggling with my mental health. There was a solid period of time where I was convinced I wouldn’t make it to 21. Thankfully, nothing bad happened; I feel so far removed from that period (I promise I’m doing so much better!). I think most people would consider it cringe to say that “music saved my life”; but if I didn’t have music and songs that made me feel some sense of belonging – like there were others out there that were going through similar things to what I’d gone through – then I don’t know where I’d be. Or if I’d even be here. So in a sense, the simple fact of being here was the catalysing event in pursuing a creative path in life: I’m still here, I’m still(/now) thriving, what reason do I have not to share everything I can with the world – why not chase this thing to the ends of the earth, you know?

Zygmund, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’d describe myself as a composer, interdisciplinary artist, and music journalist. While my creative work would broadly fit in the contemporary classical music sphere, I strive to write music that transcends boundaries of “classical”, “pop”, “contemporary” – those kinds of genre-labels people give to art. I’ve composed music for concert hall, chamber ensemble, orchestra, opera, film, theatre, and interdisciplinary contexts, with projects including queer-psychological-horror-opera, 31-TET microtonal string quartets, and graphic-score video games.

Since I started composing in 2019, I’ve been really grateful to have worked with some wonderful musicians and organisations including the Composers Conference, Cheltenham Music Festival, Access Contemporary Music Chicago, Salastina Los Angeles, Opera in Oborne, and most recently with Guildhall Opera Department in association with the Royal Opera House – who performed my second opera URSA MINOR, created with librettist Alexia Peniguel.

Alongside this, I’ve worked as a music journalist for around four years: I’m the artistic director of PRXLUDES, a contemporary music magazine focused on promoting and celebrating the work of emerging composers in the UK and across the world. It’s been a super exciting time; we’ve interviewed over 90 composers and counting, and collaborated with prominent UK music organisations such as Nonclassical, Britten Sinfonia, and National Youth Choir. I’m incredibly grateful to my co-director Patrick Ellis, and the small team and community we’ve cultivated around ourselves, for making this happen – these things are never possible alone.

As I mentioned previously, I had a bit of an unconventional background going into composition, and into contemporary classical music. While I learned piano when I was younger, I had no idea that being a “composer” was a thing you could do – and at school, I was led by my teachers to believe that classical music wasn’t written after 1945 (which is a complete lie). So I spent most of my teenage and uni years playing in bands and being involved in the DIY punk and alternative music scenes in the UK; while incredibly stimulating and formative for me musically, there was a point where I realised I wanted to go further with my art – I wanted to do more. Once I graduated from uni, I felt quite lost. I ended up working in bars and catering for a number of years, while working on my own musical projects on the side (including a post-rock album that served as my audition piece); one summer, I decided to apply for a number of conservatoires and music schools for composition on a whim – and got into Royal Birmingham Conservatoire for a Masters in Composition in 2019.

About a year into my journey at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the pandemic hit – just when I started feeling comfortable composing and putting projects together, everything was halted. There was a period of time during the first UK lockdown where I felt incredibly disconnected – both from the wonderful community of composers at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (who I still consider to be some of my closest friends), as well as the wider contemporary music landscape at large. It’s from this feeling that I initially started PRXLUDES: as a way to foster more togetherness, connectedness, at a time we were all feeling isolated, while also finding an alternative way to celebrate the incredible musical talent around the UK at a time when concerts and premieres were not taking place. From there, I found a love for having these conversations – talking with composers about music, creative practice, and so much more.

Since then, my compositional journey has been somewhat nonlinear – picking up disparate projects here and there, working with ensembles every now and then, doing workshops and masterclasses. One incredibly important moment for me was the commission and premiere of my first opera, ‘hikikomori!’, by Opera in Oborne in April 2022; conceived following a chance meeting at a wedding in 2019, the piece was my first large-scale work (70 minutes for piano and voices). The process of writing and workshopping this opera opened up my current interests in music theatre and dramatic music-making, which led me to pursue a MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (2023-24) – where I’m currently a Junior Fellow for the next academic year, researching metamodern aesthetics and their presence in contemporary composition.

I’m of the unwavering opinion that no-one is an island – absolutely none of this happens alone. I’m privileged to have had some incredible teachers and mentors on my artistic journey – from my composition tutors Ed Bennett, Edwin Roxburgh, and Howard Skempton at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, to my opera-making mentors Toby Young and Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh at Guildhall, to influential figures who have offered me invaluable guidance at composition academies and festivals including Marcos Balter, Zeena Parkins, and Derrick Skye, to the myriad of wonderful composers and artists who I have the pleasure of sharing this creative journey with. Hollie Harding once said that composition is a community, not a competition; this is a phrase I hold very dear to my creative practice, and one I believe should permeate our industry at large.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about composition, and classical music, floating around that aren’t necessarily true – and serve more the myth that classical music is this “exclusive” thing, or upper-class, or not necessarily “for” wider audiences. Firstly, an important strand of my own creative practice is dismantling the falsehood that composition is a purely solitary activity; the traditional image of the composer slaving over a desk for weeks, bringing a final score to an ensemble, soloist, or conductor and then that’s the “finished” masterpiece. Certainly, there are moments and commissions where that has to be the case, whether because of tight turnarounds or other practical reasons – but I’ve come to the realisation that the most rewarding works of art come from close collaboration, particularly where the composer isn’t considered the “ultimate authority” in the artistic process. One of the most formative moments of understanding this for me was the process of collaborating with Alexia Peniguel and the Guildhall Opera Department, on my second opera ‘URSA MINOR’; through such a closely scrutinised process of collaboration, we were able to create something truly special that none of us could have achieved purely by ourselves.

I like worldbuilding. I compose to engage with other peoples’ imaginations as much as portraying my own. I feel like that’s the role of the composer in society – to capture those feelings, energies, through our art form that are hard to find in the “real world” – and it just so happens that music is the medium we use. My most recent project was a mixed quartet (clarinet, guitar, double bass, percussion) I wrote for ensemble àktapha, which premiered in Athens, Greece in mid-September. Over the course of writing the piece, we created an email thread together in which I sent prompts in the form of text, pictures, and audio, and they responded with their own; the musical material of the piece was then derived from the ensemble’s responses, culminating in a gorgeous poem written in Greek by clarinettist Dafni Mengou, recited over an Americana-tinged guitar line. This piece we created together – ‘false vacuum songs’ – is not just a product of my imagination, performed by them; it’s just as much ensemble àktapha’s music as it is mine.

I think composers staying in the lanes of “classical” music, “contemporary” music, or only identifying with those traditions, is a bit of an outdated view in 2024. It keeps classical music elite; and if the art form is to move forward, if we’re to reach new audiences and be relevant today, genre barriers need to be broken down. For me, the reason my music is falling under the “contemporary classical” umbrella is simply because the musicians I work with play that kind of music, and I communicate my ideas to them using a system commonly known as “Western classical notation”; the reason I write opera isn’t because of some deep-seeded aesthetic tradition, but because I happen to like working with people who call their main discipline “opera”. For me, the most beautiful moments of what one might call “established” forms come when you break out of the traditions of those forms – create work that engages with communities outside of those built around their cultural norms. I think Ben Nobuto does this absolutely fantastically; pieces such as ‘Hallelujah Sim.’ – which I genuinely believe will be seen as one of the most influential pieces of classical music of the 21st Century – engage with classical forms and traditions playfully, while also bringing in so many disparate elements from pop culture and production. Reverent and irreverent at the same time. I think that’s a beautiful thing.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

As Hollie Harding said: composition is a community, not a competition. Maybe this comes from my own experiences in various punk and alternative music communities, but my MO has always been that we need to support each other, to support our scene. Without us being there, showing up, showing support, there isn’t a scene – just a loose disparity of people who aren’t interacting, and an artistic medium that stagnates. What I think we’d benefit most from is cross-pollination – both with fellow composers, as well as with audiences in the wider public. It’s an ethos that permeates both the journalistic work I do with PRXLUDES and my own practice as a creative – to help curate and celebrate this amazing community of humans doing awesome stuff with sound and with music, together.

While there have certainly been many issues plaguing arts funding in the UK, I can’t help but feel optimistic when I look at the incredible people making incredible work right now – in the face of all of this adversity. In London, crossover organisations like Nonclassical, Through the Noise, The Listening Project, and Tantrum have done incredible jobs bringing together classical, contemporary, electronic, and experimental musics in nightclubs and other cool spaces. Across the UK, organisations like the Royal Philharmonic Society, National Youth Choir, Britten Sinfonia, Standard Issue, and many more are actively out here giving opportunities to emerging composers. I really think our generation of composers owes a lot to these organisations.

On the audience side: go to concerts! We live in an exciting time for new music; there’s so much cool stuff happening nowadays. Look up the concert halls in your city – go to the concerts where you don’t recognise any of the names on the programme. Don’t just stick to the Mozarts and the Beethovens. If you’re a young person who doesn’t think classical music is “for” you, seek out a concert playing music by a young composer; you’ll be surprised as to how many parallels and resonances you’ll find. If you’re feeling cynical about certain big organisations’ programming choices, look DIY (one of the best concerts I’ve been to recently was a free improvisation on a rooftop in Brooklyn): in London, ensembles like Standard Issue, Terra Invisus and CoMA, and venues like Avalon Café and IKLECTIK (who hopefully will find a new space soon!) are doing groundbreaking work that you won’t necessarily find in the “conventional” concert halls.

Throughout history, classical music has reflected the time and society in which it was written – the music being written right now does the same. Classical music isn’t some museum-piece, historical artefact that certain elites want you to believe it is – that’s bullshit. It lives with us, it evolves with us. That’s what I find the most rewarding about being a composer – the infinite possibilities of expression within this art form, and experiencing how the people around us express themselves through this. It’s so exciting to see how today’s artists contribute to – as composer Kian Ravaei puts it – “this intergenerational love letter to humanity that we call music.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://zdscomposer.co.uk
• Instagram: @zdscomposer
• Facebook: fb.me/zdscomposer
• Twitter: @zdscomposer
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@zdscomposer
• Other: PRXLUDES website: https://prxludes.net
  PRXLUDES Instagram: @prxludes
  PRXLUDES Twitter: @prxludes
  PRXLUDES Facebook: fb.me/prxludes

Image Credits

1, header photo – Kit McCarthy
3 – George Kokkinaris, ensemble àktapha
4 – Kurt Rohde
5, 6 – Phoebe Apfel
7 – Zoe Birkbeck, Guildhall School of Music and Drama