It is not every day you meet a 22-year-old composer and concert pianist on campus, but Ari Hooker is exactly that.
Now in the last semester of his degree in piano performance at U of M, Hooker has already composed dozens of pieces, even performing his own piano concerto with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (WSO). In 2025, CBC named him as one of the 30 hot Canadian classical musicians under 30, and he shows no signs of slowing down.
“I’ve always just believed in being dedicated to the things you love and working hard, not accepting laziness, and just always trying to become a better version of yourself and grow as a human in all aspects of your life,” the pensive phenom told the Manitoban.
It can be said Hooker’s musical journey started before he was even born. Born to Yuri Hooker — the principal cellist at WSO for 25 years — and conductor and pianist Michelle Mourre, music was ingrained into his family. Hooker started playing piano at age three and cello at four, initially taught by his parents before moving onto other teachers.
“Music was always a value in our home from a very young age, and it was a discipline that we had growing up,” he commented.
Unexpectedly, one of Hooker’s early forays in music was playing keyboard with the four-piece indie band Training Wheels, which he started with a high school friend. The band debuted with the single “Me and You” in December of 2021, wrote and released several singles and an EP and performed shows before going dormant due to the band members’ diverging schedules.
“It was super different from anything I’d experienced in the classical world because obviously, the energy of a classical concert is completely different to that of a rock show,” he said. “It was a super fun time.”
Hooker started to compose more prolifically at the end of high school, which is when he recognized his zeal for composing.
“[Composing] was a completely new love for music than the piano had ever given me. Not that I don’t love the piano, but composing was just something totally new and something that I knew that I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he said.
One of Hooker’s earliest works is a three-movement divertimento for string quintet, written in June 2021. As of now, the Gen Z composer has written 25 major compositions in total for piano, strings and symphony orchestra, each containing around 10 to 15 pieces.
Many of them have been recorded, with the latest release being The Sum of the Parts in 2026. For the album, he recorded his sonatas for violin, viola and cello and his piano quartet — compositions he considers his best works so far — with musicians from across Canada in only a week.
“A lot of the starts of pieces have been melodies or ideas that have popped into my head,” said Hooker, portraying his creative process as a combination between composing in his head and at the piano.
“I like to have everything all sorted out in my mind before I put it down on paper. I generally don’t revise very much in my works because I just like to have a clear idea of what I’m going to write before I write it down.”
“Once things are on paper, it’s just a matter of practicing it and of engraving it in music notation software, and then it’s ready to perform,” he explained. Hooker identified the 20th century, without a doubt, as his favourite musical period, characterizing it as an era where music “exploded” and became widely accessible, in addition to being shaped by different traditions. He named giants in classical music such as Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev and Sergei Rachmaninoff as his favourite composers.
“Ravel is probably my all-time favourite. I think he just had such a masterful understanding of harmony and orchestration and balance, truly a classical composer, but in a completely different harmonic setting,” the composer stated.
His fondness for the classical composers is sometimes apparent in his earlier works, especially with titles such as “Le rêve de Ravel” or “Vocalise,” the latter perhaps a nod to Rachmaninoff’s song. However, with several years of experience under his belt, Hooker is steadily finding his compositional voice, describing his sound as rich tonal harmonies and memorable melodies on classical instruments.
“When I started out, I felt as though my pieces were still my own, but they were to a degree, I guess, imitations of other styles,” he added. “But the more I compose, the more things that influence me, and the more things that I absorb, the more they coalesce into one.” His latest composition is Scenes from Korea / 한국의 장면들, Op. 16 for solo piano, composed in June and July of this year. The inspiration behind the suite was a trip to Korea with his girlfriend, which Hooker described as a “dream come true.” The recordings, alongside other recent works, will be released as an album soon.
“[The trip was] an amazing experience, super inspiring, both just as a human […] to experience a completely different culture from what you’re used to, but also as a composer to see so many new things,” he recounted.
“I just knew that I had to write a piece about it. I had to somehow express everything that I was seeing, and so I wrote a set of 16 pieces. We were there for 16 days, and I took one moment from each day that I was there and expressed it through music.”
Self-expression is at the core of Hooker’s composition, and he cited nature, other cultures and just experiencing the world as sources of inspiration. For example, the fifth piece from Scenes from Korea, “Beside A Merry Stream | 청계천 옆에,” muses on the stream that traverses Seoul, writing in an Instagram post that he was so exuberant in that moment even the stream he was walking along seemed happy. Composing is his way of expressing what words and language cannot convey.
“I’ve always just really wanted people to experience the beauty and the joy that music can bring,” he said. “If my music can somehow inspire [other people], that would be success for me.”
Hooker can spend eight to 10 hours a day composing or practicing, depending on the number of upcoming recitals. He tries to balance the two, though he admitted, with a laugh, to favouring and enjoying composing slightly more than practicing.
However, hard work pays off and Hooker is an illustrious performer. In 2024, he won the Aikins Memorial Trophy at the Winnipeg Music Festival, an award given to most outstanding performance by an instrumentalist in a competition at the diploma level.
He had the opportunity to perform a movement of a concerto with the WSO as part of the award, and naturally, he requested to play his own composition, Piano Concerto in C Major, Op. 5. This is Hooker’s most memorable performance yet. Apart from it marking his debut with WSO, which his father was still a part of at the time, he said hearing his piece played by a live orchestra was “mind blowing.”
The virtuoso was also one of the winners in the U of M Concerto Competition in 2025, later performing as a soloist with the U of M Symphony Orchestra. He was awarded the Women’s Musical Club of Winnipeg scholarship in the same year.
“Both were absolutely an honour to be a part of and to be fortunate enough to win,” said Hooker. “It’s amazing that Manitoba has things like these to support young artists and support them in achieving their goals of becoming professional musicians.”
During his time at U of M, Hooker has studied under Juilliard graduate and pianist David Moroz, whom he described as “always very encouraging.”
“[Moroz] wanted me to play things that I loved, and I really appreciated that about his teaching,” he stated. “[The program] also just gave me a lot of freedom to learn what kind of person I wanted to become, what kind of musician I wanted to become, and it gave me the freedom to pursue my own interests as well.”
Outside of classical music, the U of M student is a Nintendo fan and video game music enthusiast. He has been transcribing the entire soundtrack of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the past year with the goal of eventually publishing the score.
Hooker looks forward to composing and performing full time after graduation. He is also considering graduate studies, possibly in Toronto or Montreal.
“I would love to continue to study composition, and continue just composing and producing more,” he said.
