§ 00 · Biography
Resident composer · Composer, interdisciplinary artist and music journalist
Zygmund de Somogyi (“Zyggy”) is a British-Filipino composer, interdisciplinary artist and music journalist based in London (they/them). Drawing from their punk rock background and DIY ethics, they employ a uniquely multifaceted approach to composition across contemporary classical, opera, theatre, film, video games and electronic music, marked by stylistic irreverence and eclecticism. Their recent works have explored themes of online folklore, collaborative worldbuilding, queer identity, metamodern aesthetics, and contradictory recontextualisations of genre and form.
They studied at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with Ed Bennett, Edwin Roxburgh and Howard Skempton, gaining an MMus in Composition (2021), and an MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Toby Young and Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh, where they held a Junior Fellowship (2024–25). Their first opera, hikikomori! (2022), was commissioned by Opera in Oborne; their second, URSA MINOR (2024), created with librettist Alexia Peniguel, premiered at the Milton Court Studio Theatre in London in association with the Royal Ballet & Opera. They were a Royal Philharmonic Society composer of 2025 —with the commission IN THE EVENT THAT YOU STAY, premiered at Wigmore Hall— and received a Fromm Foundation Composer Fellowship (2023). Since 2020 they have been artistic director and editor of the contemporary music magazine PRXLUDES, and they sing and play guitar in the punk quartet Trouble Sleeping.