Ammonite (2023) ~9’

piano trio [violin cello piano]

Ammonite was written as a part of a collaboration for the New York City Ballet Choreographic Institute with choreographer Gabrielle Lamb. Lamb stated about the piece, "My process for Ammonite began with a vague idea of exploring spirals through the ballet vocabulary. I shared some of my movement research with composer Hannah Ishizaki, who created a score that spiraled in a Fibonacci-like structure. Her entire piece unfolded outwards from a single piano note, with ideas recurring periodically on different timescales. Listening to the score again and again, I recalled a piece of video art by the artist Aki Inomata, who recast the shape of an excavated ammonite fossil in transparent resin and arranged an aquarium encounter with a modern-day octopus. (The ammonite is an extinct, spiral-shelled ancestor of the octopus and chambered nautilus.) I watched, mesmerized, as the octopus swam towards the center of the spiral. The delicate clarity of Hannah's music was a perfect soundtrack for this otherworldly creature using its fluid, hyper-articulated tentacles to explore the transparent shell."

The music starts from a single note and spirals outwards, almost as if the listener and the musical material is on a journey from the inside of an ammonite to the world outside. Once the material leaves the shell, the music is free and flowing, continuing to spiral outwards, without a shell to maintain its course.