‘La La Land’ composer has Milwaukee ties
Hurwitz studied at music conservatory
Before Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were tap-dancing to his music, before he was nominated for three Academy Awards, “La La Land” composer Justin Hurwitz was a teenager taking piano lessons at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee.
“Beethoven and Chopin and Bach and Schubert and the repertoire I played influenced me as a composer for sure,” Hurwitz said.
After Sunday, Hurwitz, 32, likely will be an Oscar-winning composer.
The former Fox Point resident recorded nearly 1,900 piano demos for “La La Land,” a musical love story about aspiring actress Mia (Stone) and stubborn jazz traditionalist Sebastian (Gosling).
Directed by Hurwitz’s friend and former roommate Damien Chazelle, the movie is up for 14 Academy Awards, tying the nomination record shared by “All About Eve” and “Titanic.” Hurwitz has two entries in the best original song category — the film’s bittersweet theme, “City of Stars,” and the wide-eyed, tear-jerking “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” — and he’s the favorite to win for best original score.
“It’s very flattering and exciting,” said Hurwitz, who has
already won two Golden Globes and a BAFTA Award for his work on “La La Land.” “It’s a great feeling to know we stuck to our guns and were tenacious and continued pushing to make this movie, and to make the version we wanted to make.”
Hurwitz was just 10, living in Santa Barbara, Calif., when he started composing, four years after taking up piano.
“It was really consuming,” Hurwitz said. “With piano, sometimes I was really into it, other times getting me to practice was like pulling teeth. But I would compose for hours. My parents would have to force me to go to bed.”
His father, writer Ken Hurwitz, is a Whitefish Bay native, and the family spent summer vacations in Wisconsin. They moved to Fox Point when Justin Hurwitz was in eighth grade so he “could have a really great public school education,” he said.
Hurwitz took hourlong piano lessons once a week with Stefanie Jacob, a piano teacher at the Wisconsin Conservatory for 30 years.
“Justin was one of my smartest students,” Jacob said. “When he was a senior, he decided he was going to learn Beethoven’s First Concerto. Not just the first movement — he was going to learn the whole thing, and he did. That’s huge. … I was just really pleased that he had the self-discipline, and apparently he still does.”
Hurwitz attended Harvard University after graduating from Nicolet High School in 2003. The first week of his freshman year, he co-founded the pop band Chester French, where he met Chazelle and became good friends with frontman D.A. Wallach, coincidentally a Milwaukee native.
“Back then, (Hurwitz) described himself as misanthropic,” said Wallach, who has a funny cameo in “La La Land” as the overthe-top singer of an ’80s cover band. “He was both self-aware and also eccentric, which is a unique combination. He’s always done whatever he wanted to do and been very serious about his work and not cared about what other people think.”
Hurwitz wrote songs and played piano for the band.
“We bring together years of jazz and classical training and try to hone the repertoire’s most precious licks and passages into modern pop songs,” he said in 2004.
During their sophomore year, Hurwitz and Chazelle became roommates, “and that changed everything,” Hurwitz said. “He was taking filmmaking classes, I was taking music classes, and we were talking about movies we dreamed to make and how the music could work.”
They left Chester French to focus on that dream — right before the group “had record deals thrown at them,” Hurwitz said. “There was definitely a moment where we thought, ‘Did we blow it? Did we miss our chance?’ … And we had no idea if what we were working on was ever going to pan out.”
Chazelle and Hurwitz released their debut movie collaboration, the low-budget film musical “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” in 2010.
Hurwitz started working on the music for “La La Land” in 2011, working on the film full-time for a year. “But we couldn’t get it made,” Hurwitz said, due to lack of financing.
The two moved on to another project, “Whiplash,” about a promising drum student and his abusive teacher. It was released to raves in 2014, and actor J.K. Simmons won a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance as the hard-driving teacher.
That movie led to a development deal with Lionsgate to make “La La Land,” with Hurwitz working on the film’s music, full-time, for 21⁄2 years.
Wallach lived just two blocks away from where the film was edited and got to listen to demos before casting began.
“When I heard some of the songs, ‘Audition’ in particular, I thought, ‘Oh my God, these are incredible,’ ” Wallach said. “This was a critical moment in both of their careers, and they were taking this huge risk, and at that moment I knew they were going to nail it.”
“The volume of music that (Hurwitz) had to produce is just staggering, and he doesn’t settle for just good enough,” Wallach said. “Everything had to be perfect. If that meant writing the same part 30 times, no matter how agonizing that may be, he was always willing to put in the time. In some ways, the movie itself is a tribute to the music.”
At the Academy Awards, Hurwitz could be rewarded for that music.
“It’s a great feeling and I hope it does inspire people, whether in Milwaukee or other places, to pursue music or pursue any other creative dream,” Hurwitz said.