Hannah Ishizaki writes music from inside the instrument. A violinist before she was a composer, the Pittsburgh-area native became the first composer ever awarded the Juilliard School's full-ride Kovner Fellowship, and in February 2025 the youngest woman ever to have a work premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, when her orchestral piece Spin opened a programme at Heinz Hall. She is now pursuing her doctorate at Princeton.
Her pieces are famously physical, built from the athletics of bowing, the flex and judder of strings under pressure, but what audiences remember is their fragility: harmonics like held breath, textures that hover and then snap to life. Commissions have come from the Attacca Quartet, Midori's outreach ensembles, the Lakes Area Music Festival, and this year Lincoln Center and Tanglewood.
This festival has a personal claim on her music: her five-movement Violin Sonata was given its world premiere at the Dresden Music Festival in May 2024 by Nathan Meltzer, the same violinist you will hear playing her music this August in Kerry.
