Justin Hurwitz, composer of ‘La La Land’: “A big hit can make you lose your creative drive” | Culture

Eight years after its premiere, The city of stars (La La Land) has not left the lives of its creators. Or at least their music. Composer Justin Hurwitz (Los Angeles, 39 years old) has since directed hundreds of versions live to picture (screenings of the film with the soundtrack performed live) on four continents, from Australia to Japan. In addition, Hurwitz is preparing a stage edition with new music that will premiere on Broadway. His most recent stop was on Friday night at the 18th Filmucité in Tenerife, where, in front of 1,600 people, he conducted 90 musicians in the Adán Martín auditorium.

“Composing the music for La La Land “It changed my life. The fact that I am performing it in Tenerife eight years after its release is nothing I expected,” Hurwitz tells EL PAÍS, minutes before entering the CajaCanarias building to give a talk and after rehearsing with the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra. The harps, trumpets, cellos and pianos deployed for the concert prove the variety needed to create the melancholic and nostalgic, but also emotional and energetic, soundtrack that accompanies the drama that won six Oscars, two of them for Hurwitz (best music and original song). “I just hope that my self-sacrificing way of working has not changed and that I continue to have so much drive to create music. Sometimes, when you have a big success, you can lose that fire,” he says.

He is aware that the popularity of music La La Land has led him to associate himself with a single style. The reviews on his latest work, Babylonunderscored its similarity to the music Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone dance and sing to, especially in its more grueling phases. “It’s a bittersweet feeling. Sweet in the sense of having work that’s so beloved and has this staying power. At the same time, you like to believe that your best work is yet to come. But at some point, every artist has their best work under their belt; it’s the sad reality of being an artist.”

The Californian has managed to make his soundtracks listen to themselves, independently and without the need to accompany the film. There are classics with more popular weight such as Nino Rota’s iconic score for The Godfatherthe Imperial March of Star Wars or the whistles that Ennio Morricone composed for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But Mia & Sebastian’s Theme of La La Land The album is ahead in terms of views on platforms such as Spotify and YouTube. It was the ninth best-selling vinyl of 2017, the same ones people paid 50 euros for on Thursday and queued up for Hurwitz to sign for them. “The ultimate goal is to make a score unequivocally belong to a film, so that you can listen to it ten years later and know exactly what film it accompanies. However, there are some incredible compositions that are not so easy to hear off-screen, because sometimes they are very subtle or are, above all, texture and not melody. A soundtrack that can be melodic and have a sound that you can hum, almost as if it were pop music, becomes listenable.”

A relationship without end

Hurwitz is one of those who inherit cultural capital. The son of a professional ballet dancer (Gail Hurwitz) and a writer (Ken Hurwitz), he was already taking piano lessons at the age of six and says that by the time he was 10 he was already composing. “The piano is the only instrument I can play, but not professionally. It’s part of the reason I got interested in writing. I hated playing, I was very nervous at recitals because I had to memorize the music and not make mistakes. In the competitions there was always someone better than me and younger, and that’s how I realized that what I was really good at was composing music.”

He began his career when he met the director of his five films, Damien Chazelle, at the age of 18. Hurwitz studied music and Chazelle studied visual and environmental studies, but the two were roommates from their first year at Harvard. “We formed a band, the Chester Frenchs, with me on piano and Damien on drums (like his friend, I knew he was good at playing an instrument, but not great). We left the band in our second year to make films and they continued with the group and got a record deal.” The group recorded a second album in 2012, while Chazelle and Hurwitz tried to convince producers to film a nostalgia for 60s musicals, which was La La Land“It was very strange, even frustrating, to see your former band achieve such success.”