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Senior Keigo Hirakawa, electrical engineer (photo by Denise Applewhite) |
fill senior's days and nights
By Caroline Moseley
If I have two things to do and only time for one, I'll do both anyway," says Keigo Hirakawa '00, an electrical engineering major who is also a jazz pianist. In addition to his BSE, he is earning certificates in computer science and in music performance.
While his double life has taught him "a lot about time management," he says, there are days when time manages him. After spending 10 or 12 hours in the lab, "I practice piano from midnight to 3:00 am." The secret to being a full-time electrical engineer and full-time musician? "I don't sleep much."
Hirakawa, who was born in Tokyo, began playing the piano at age four. His mother was a piano teacher, and his earliest memories are of hearing Western classical piano pieces played in his home, he says.
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... and jazz pianist (photo by Frank Wojciechowski) |
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New languages
In 1989, when Hirakawa was 11, his family moved to the United States. Music took a temporary back seat to other studies.
"I couldn't speak English at all," he says, "and it seemed more important to learn English than to play the piano." Over the next few years, he did learn to play clarinet and saxophone in school bands in Akron, Ohio; Nashville, Tenn.; and Cleveland, where his family lives now.
Between junior and senior years in high school, Hirakawa attended a summer program at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, intending to study jazz saxophone. At Eastman, however, "I realized I didn't really know anything at all about jazz. There was so much to learn. It was as much a new language as English had been."
Abandoning the sax, he returned to the piano as his primary instrument, because "To be fluent in a language like jazz, you have to have complete control of your instrument. Having played piano for so many years, that was clearly the one at which I was best."
Hirakawa believes that "my music definitely developed as a result of American education, which encourages people to pursue things they are passionate about, things in which they excel. Though my Japanese heritage is extremely important to me, I am glad my parents came to the US." Princeton appealed to him as "a place where I could study both engineering and music."
Soulstice Sextet
A member of the Princeton University Jazz Ensembles (PUJE) for four years, Hirakawa has played with the Hard Bop Ensemble, Miles Davis Ensemble, Concert Jazz Ensemble and Jazz Composers' Ensemble. He credits PUJE director Anthony D.J. Branker with "giving me many opportunities to play at Princeton. He has taught me what it takes to be a professional musician. He never lets me cut any corners."
Hirakawa is also cofounder, leader, arranger -- and pianist -- for the Soulstice Jazz Sextet. Soulstice joined him in the April recital that is a requirement for his music performance certificate.
He enjoys Soulstice gigs, he says, because "We're always testing each other. I see the bass player smile and throw a cross rhythm at me, just to see my reaction. My way to combat this is to imitate him on the piano. Then someone will superimpose another rhythmic idea." With the ensemble, he says, "We try to see how much real-time musical conversation we can have on stage." Since improvisation is the heart of jazz, "No matter how much you rehearse, the performance never ends up being what it was at rehearsal."
In playing classical music, he says, "the creativity is in your interpretation of the written music. In jazz, it's in the way you improvise over and around a certain melody, a certain harmonic structure."
Signal processing
As an electrical engineer, Hirakawa's interests are in signal processing, which he defines as "treatment of image or video data in order to enhance the quality of or compress data," and in computer architecture -- "the theoretical work behind construction of higher performance computers." He has done senior independent work in both areas and finds electrical engineering as creative a field as music.
"I've always liked math and science," he says. "Being comfortable with them lets me be creative in electrical engineering, just as being able to play the piano lets me be creative with jazz."
After graduation, Hirakawa plans to begin work on a PhD in electrical engineering at Cornell University, while continuing to study with jazz pianist Stephen Scott in New York City.His ambition is to become a professor of electrical engineering and a professional jazz pianist. "These are two separate roads, on either of which I can walk forever," he says. "I cannot decide between them. I hope I never have to."
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