Adagio for 2 harps and strings
Composition and premiere: Hisaishi wrote his Adagio for 2 Harps and Strings in 2023 and conducted the first performance on September 9, 2023, with the New Japan Philharmonic at Sumida Triphony Hall.
Joe Hisaishi was born Mamoru Fujisawa in Nagano, Japan, and adopted his stage name as a Japanese gloss on the name of the American record producer Quincy Jones, whose work he admired. Hisaishi studied at the Kunitachi Music College in Tokyo, and then in the early 1980s released two hard-to-categorize LPs: MKWAJU and Information. The latter album was issued by the Japan Record label, which shared a parent company with the producers of Hayao Miyazaki’s second film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Hisaishi was asked to record an “image album” for the movie, a promotional item made during development, which led to him scoring the film itself. In 1985 Miyazaki founded Studio Ghibli, and Hisaishi has scored every Miyazaki-directed picture since. The strength of their composer-director partnership is often compared to that of John Williams and Steven Spielberg, and Hisaishi’s sweeping melodic sense and sometimes jazz-inflected harmonies have become essential parts of Miyazaki’s animated worlds. He also draws inspiration from “minimal music,” more widely known as minimalism (a term some practitioners reject)—including the music of American composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
Over the last decade, Hisaishi has also grown his presence in the concert hall with live performances of both his film scores and a growing number of purely symphonic and chamber works. He now appears as a conductor and composer with leading American and European orchestras and has released a series of new recordings on Deutsche Grammophon.
Hisaishi’s Adagio for 2 Harps and Strings was inspired by the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, an elegiac and often excerpted movement. Mahler (1860-1911) has become something of a touchstone for Hisaishi, who even built himself a small studio outside Tokyo inspired by the “composing huts” Mahler liked to work in during summer vacations around Austria.
Hisaishi’s Adagio was commissioned by the New Japan Philharmonic to be performed before he conducted Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in September 2023. The instrumentation matches that of Mahler’s movement, but with the addition of a second harp. In his own program note, Hisaishi writes:
I vaguely envisioned writing a “Hisaishi version of Mahler’s Adagietto,” though ultimately, I simply aimed to compose a piece at a slower tempo.
Minimalist compositions typically emphasize rhythm, making slow tempos less common, especially in American minimalist works. I don’t have many slow pieces in my repertoire either, so I saw this as an opportunity to challenge myself. Additionally, performing this piece alongside Mahler’s work brought a certain level of pressure.....
The opening harp motif, a semitone higher than Mahler’s, is a direct homage to his work, used, of course, with great respect.
While I aimed for a logical structure, I hope that the result is a generous ode to nature and humanity, and also a prayer.
Benjamin Pesetsky
Benjamin Pesetsky is a composer and writer. He serves on the staff of the San Francisco Symphony and also contributes program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony.