San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Justin Hurwitz conducts the S.F. Symphony playing his score for “La La Land.”
Film composer Justin Hurwitz says it’s understandable that most people who’ve heard his music in movie theaters over the past several years associate him with jazz. After all, he teamed up with his friend and former Harvard roommate, director Damien Chazelle, to score Chazelle’s first three films — “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009),” “Whiplash” (2014) and “La La Land” (2016) — each of which incorporates jazz elements into its score or even its plot.
In “Whiplash,” Miles Teller plays a ferociously talented jazz drummer under J.K. Simmons’ sadistic tutelage, and in the musical romance “La La Land,” Ryan Gosling plays a throwback jazz pianist. “La La Land” won six Academy Awards, including two for Hurwitz at just age 31 for best original song and best original score.
“But the truth is, I didn’t come from a jazz background,” Hurwitz said by phone. “I had to learn the jazz idiom by working on those movies. I grew up playing classical piano and studying traditional composition, and I always wanted to be a dramatic film composer.” On Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 27 and 28, he will conduct the entire “La La Land” score live, as the film screens at Davies Symphony Hall as part of San Francisco Symphony’s popular film series, now in its sixth season.
It’s been quite a year already for Hurwitz, who in January won Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice awards for best original score for his fourth collaboration with Chazelle — the emotionally probing portrait of astronaut Neil Armstrong, “First Man” (also starring Gosling). (Widely considered a shoo-in for another Oscar nomination since the film premiered at film festivals last fall, Hurwitz was, surprisingly, snubbed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when nominations were announced.) Hurwitz’s scores are known for being intentionally — and unusually, among the murky uniformity of some background scores — melodic. While composing “La La Land,” Hurwitz famously worked for months straight at the piano, churning out more then 1,500 demos of distinct melodies before landing on the ones that would eventually charm audiences in songs such as “City of Stars” and “Someone in the Crowd.”
Hurwitz spent two months noodling at the piano for “First Man” before landing on the climactic accompaniment for Armstrong’s historic moon landing. Hurwitz called “First Man” “particularly challenging,” not only because he incorporated ethereal theremin sounds (without slipping into campiness), but also because he had to “figure out how to have Armstrong’s loss and loneliness felt throughout, but use some of those same themes to score the most exciting, heroic, purely triumphant parts of the movie. It ended up being a very emotionally complex movie, which is just what
Damien wanted.”
Hurwitz realized at a young age that composing was his “biggest passion. I’d been taking piano lessons since age 6, and I started composing when I was 10,” he said. “My parents got me some composing equipment for my 10th birthday, and it was absolutely addictive. Hours would just disappear. It was all-consuming in a way nothing in my life ever was.”
By the time he met Chazelle at Harvard (Hurwitz was studying music theory, Chazelle was studying film), “I thought, well, if I want to compose orchestral music, I should probably be a film composer. It’s such a great platform that can move and touch so many more people than go regularly to the symphony.”
Although he said he was “absolutely terrified” the first time he conducted “La La Land” live with a full orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, Hurwitz said he’s grown to love the “challenge of these live-film performances.” In San Francisco, he will host onstage pre-concert Q&As before the performances.
“These live-film performances are kind of a high-wire act in the sense that the movie just keeps going and you can’t fall behind, you have to keep up with it and stay in sync. You compose and record a film score so incrementally, biting off little sections until you get them just right, and later stitching it all together. But when it flows straight through live, it’s like being on a fast-moving train.
“Growing up, I loved watching the textures of orchestral music come alive in front of my eyes. It’s fun actually seeing, not just hearing, all the gear changes — especially in a score like ‘La La Land,’ which abruptly switches from orchestra to jazz, back to orchestra. They’re some of the more difficult parts for (the orchestra), but it’s fun for people to see us have to flip on a dime like that. There is some really technical and challenging music in the ‘La La Land’ score, which is fun to see created live — like all the piano solos played in sync with the picture. It’s like a magic trick.”