In 2017, when Hannah Ishizaki was still in high school, the premiere of her work City of Bridges made her the youngest woman ever to be programmed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. She grew up in Mount Lebanon, in the suburban South Hills of Pittsburgh, where violin lessons commenced at age 6. She’d been so inspired by a flamenco band that visited her elementary school (featuring a solo violinist) that she begged her parents for lessons – she “just couldn’t stop playing air violin,” she told me in our recent interview. She and her father joined the Pittsburgh Mandolin Orchestra together, and she later enrolled in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra.
Her first steps into composition were made pragmatically, when a friend in middle school lamented that the viola never seemed to have the melody. Ishizaki’s solution: to write a piece that put the viola on top. A wide range of composition teachers followed, starting with Charley Rappapport, the director of the Pittsburgh Mandolin Orchestra. “He was the only person I knew at the time who composed things because he would do a lot of arranging for the Mandolin Orchestra,” she explained. Rappapport eventually recommended that Ishizaki go to the City Music Center at Duquesne University, where she connected with several other area composers, including Chris Massa, who all contributed to the early development of her craft.
When it came time to start thinking about college, pursuing a degree in composition had become a serious consideration. Seeking practical advice on a few of her pieces, she turned to conductor and composer Francesco Lecce-Chong, then director of the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony and Assistant Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. That’s when lightning struck. Lecce-Chong suggested that Ishizaki write a piece for the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony, hopeful that the work could also be programmed for “Fiddlesticks,” the Pittsburgh Symphony’s educational series for children.
“He was really kind and really supportive of young musicians and young composers,” Ishizaki remembers. “It was just wonderful that he looked at my music in the first place – I was 16, I think.” According to Ishizaki, it was Lecce-Chong’s perspective as a conductor that illuminated very basic and practical things about the work that her other composer-mentors hadn’t immediately considered.
The final result, City of Bridges, is a short concert overture named for one of Pittsburgh’s defining urban features: its 446 bridges. The piece incorporates an obscure melody by fellow Pittsburgh native Stephen Foster, called “A Thousand Miles from Home.” This melody interacts with a pointillistic, structured theme representing the bridges, and flowing, smooth lines representing the rivers.
As the timing worked out, Lecce-Chong was able to program City of Bridges on a Fiddlesticks concert prior to debuting the work with the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony. Ishizaki remembers that the musicians of the orchestra met her new piece with equal enthusiasm and encouragement for the teenage composer. Various players offered up tips and pointers for refining the idiosyncrasies of their parts, which catalyzed a number of ongoing friendships in the orchestra. Since then, City of Bridges has become a staple of the “Fiddlesticks” program and has been performed several times by the PSO since its premiere.
For Ishizaki, her developing passion for composition wasn’t just about orchestra music. “It was making music with people that I really loved and trusted,” she said. “I discovered that it’s really hard to have an opportunity to write for orchestra, and I feel very lucky to have had the experience when I was so young. What I really love is making music with specific people, making music for the people that I know. I wanted to learn a lot from the people that were around me.”
Her next touchpoint with the PSO was during Covid while she was a student at Juilliard. The orchestra launched an online series called “Front Row,” and they reached out to ask if she had a solo piece for an episode entitled “Finding Your Song,” which was about educational opportunities in Pittsburgh and the ways that young musicians can grow. Violist Devin Moore, her childhood friend, performed her piece for the episode, and they both shared their experiences about growing up in the city and playing together in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony.
Next week (Feb, 21 & 23) marks the premiere of Spin, her first commission from the orchestra. Hearkening back to her early years as a young violinist inspired by flamenco, Ishizaki had already imagined she’d like to create a work inspired by her love of dance. In her first meeting with music director Manfred Honeck, he gave her carte blanche for the commission, but mentioned that – if she didn’t have an idea yet – February is the month of dance in Vienna. It was a coincidental alignment, but it catalyzed the deal and Spin was born.
Spin is inspired by Viennese Waltz and EDM. Ishizaki says, “I thought it was a fun combination because both genres make you feel this impulse to move. There have actually been studies done in music cognition about EDM, that it evokes more of a sense of movement than other genres, so I really wanted to capture the timbres that are found in that genre and try to translate them to an acoustic orchestra. In EDM, there are beat drops and breakdowns and areas of stasis, while the main element of the Viennese Waltz is that it’s a rotary dance; I wanted to have this sort of continuous motion, and also emphasize the thing that’s similar between them, which is this feeling of suspended time.”
The interplay between science and artistic expression is an underlying feature of Ishizaki’s developing body of work. She recalled to me, “I did a lot of STEM-related things in high school, and I didn’t really decide what I wanted to do until I applied to college. I applied to a bunch of universities, and ended up applying to Juilliard as a what-if.”
While her time at Juilliard compelled her to focus intently on the musical side of her interests, she told me, “I’ve started to circle back around and get into [STEM]. I wrote an orchestra piece about the process of melting glass, and recently, for my second-year exam [as a PhD candidate at Princeton], we have to write a piece that responds to something that’s different from [our own work], so I decided to respond to a sound artist named Moritz Simon Geist. He makes these really cool robotic sound sculptures, so I’m trying to make a robotic sound sculpture right now.”
Ishizaki’s recent body of new works includes further explorations into methods of sound generation. Dance and movement are pervasive features, with works like Spin that are inspired by music that triggers movement, and chamber works that include motion sensors and fixed electronics, where the movement shapes the music. Reacting to the way things work and what they’re made of is a compelling feature of Ishizaki’s process. And despite her already expansive body of impressive work, Ishizaki’s musical journey is just getting started.
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