Alumni Spotlight |
10/31/2025
Mikel Hurwitz ’01, whose musical skills evolved over 11 years at UCC, is enjoying a flourishing career composing for film, TV and live performance.
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Hurwitz is a prolific writer of scores for Hallmark Channel’s feel-good TV movies, many of which shoot in Ontario and British Columbia. |
The opportunity arose for him in 2019, after connecting with Hallmark’s then-head of music.
At the time, Hurwitz was in Hollywood, where he worked for five years as synthesizer programmer and assistant for legendary composer Danny Elfman on mega-projects including The Grinch, Dumbo and Justice League. But as he got tapped for more Hallmark assignments, he had to walk away from that role.
“My wife and I were having our first child, and although I really liked [working with Elfman], it didn’t allow me to own any music writing,” says Hurwitz, whose oeuvre blends orchestral and electronic sounds.
In 2020, despite film and TV shooting being paused due to the pandemic, he got even busier. “Hallmark had films in their library they wanted to rescore and recut, and I did five of them that year, and 10 in 2021,” he says.
Now back in Toronto with his wife Irina Bazik, a classical pianist, and their two children, Hurwitz averages three to five projects per year for the broadcaster.
His work can be heard in a couple of Hallmark movies that premiered this year: Home Turf, about a college president who must put up the school football team in her home; and An Unexpected Valentine, about a man and woman brought together in a rideshare who try to find the owners of a lost engagement ring.
“In our world that’s so dark right now, these films serve a social good,” Hurwitz says. “They’re cute, they’re lovely, and you always know how they’re going to end. They make people happy.”
He describes his approach to them as “old-style film scoring, where you have a theme for a character, and a theme for a concept in the film, and you build on those and do variations throughout.” He’s typically a one-man band, combining live instruments and synthesized orchestrations.
The work, he says, “enables me to do more artistic things and passion projects — films that might not have a big budget, but that I care about.”
One such film is the documentary Soul of a Nation, about political polarization in Israel. The project gave him a chance to stretch out.
He remotely recorded a live orchestra in Budapest and a solo violinist from Los Angeles. Nodding to Middle Eastern history and Israel’s diverse ethnicity, he incorporated ancient instruments including the oud (similar to a lute) and lyre harp.
He also used the shofar — a ritual horn which he recorded, sampled, then mapped to a keyboard so he could play chords. “I’m really interested in taking organic source material and running it through electronics,” he notes.
He believes this is his best work, and is releasing a vinyl pressing of the soundtrack — the first time he’s ever done so.
Musically inclined since he was a toddler, Hurwitz recalls music classes in the Prep, then everybody learning to play the recorder in Year 5.
“It was a sonic nightmare,” he recalls with a laugh. “But I liked the concept of a wind instrument, so I got into clarinet.”
He moved on to the jazz band, where, over the years, he played clarinet, bass and piano. “Doing the concert and symphonic bands was great training, because it had me reading music and playing in an ensemble with a conductor,” he says.
Myles Crawford, the jazz band conductor, and Tony Gomes, current music department head, were influential also in opening Hurwitz’s ears to computer music.
“They set up a little room in the music facility called the MIDI Lab, where there were 10 computers [with music software], and I would spend every recess and lunch period sitting there, experimenting,” he recalls.
”I felt such support at UCC to pursue whatever I wanted,” he reflects. “I feel so fortunate to have gone to a school that valued the arts the way UCC did.“