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Biography

About Justin Levitt

Composer & Pianist Off Stage Justin's Philosophy
Justin Levitt composing

Composer & Pianist

Justin Levitt is an award-winning composer and pianist living in the San Francisco Bay Area, a musician whose work moves freely between the concert stage, the film score, and the published page.

He has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, composed symphonies, and written music for the Diablo Ballet performed both on stage and in short films. In describing Justin’s Carnegie Hall performance, Ron Losby, President of Steinway & Sons Americas stated that it was “as if life was given to a printed page in such a personal and intimate manner.”

His film scores have earned Gold, Silver, and Bronze Telly Awards, including the Silver Telly for “Bootleg the Movie,” a film capturing his four-hand piano improvisations, one of the more unusual and compelling documents in contemporary piano music.

As a publisher, Justin has released ten volumes of piano solos, contributed two piano duets to FJH Music, been included in the Australian Music Examination Board (AMEB) syllabus, and won seven MTAC state competition awards. In 2025, he was selected as the Commissioned Composer for MTAC’s Friends of Today’s Music program, writing First Light for piano solo. His music has reached students and performers internationally. Jan Jiracek von Arnim, Artistic Director of the International Beethoven Piano Competition Vienna, has called it “lyrical, elegant, inspirational… close to the heart.”

Through all of it, Justin counts his family as his greatest inspiration: his center, his foundation, and the reason he does what he does. He is thankful every day for the gifts he has been given, and continues to do his best to share them with the world.

Those who know his work describe him as two musicians inhabiting one person. The composer side wrestles with which notes to keep and which to leave out, orchestrating, revising, doing all the unglamorous work that great music requires. He carries that burden quietly and well. The performer side gives everything on stage, and has been known to walk offstage afterwards genuinely unsure what just happened. It's been said that he takes his listeners on not only an emotional journey, but a visual one as well.

What unites both sides is a quiet conviction that music is most powerful when it tells the truth: not the truth of theory or technique, but the truth of a life actually lived. Every piece Justin has written has come from somewhere real: a moment, a person, a feeling that wouldn't leave him alone until he put it down in notes. That is what he means when he calls it Life Music.

Both sides, it turns out, are essential.

Justin Levitt

Off Stage

Justin's Philosophy

Life Music

What is Life Music?

Life Music is not only a genre of music. Life Music is a genre of artist. Imagine a broad brushstroke containing different musical styles and genres that have influenced musicians and their music, allowing them to create something new and unique that does not fit into a pre-existing genre.

Why did you create a new genre?

I started a new genre of music because I didn't feel that my work fit into one specific category. I was writing music in so many different genres while retaining my own style. By the time it came to publish my recordings, I didn't feel my music was being properly represented. It was being put into a box with one label, one style and one description. Simply put, it was a misrepresentation of what the whole album was made up of.

Why call it Life Music?

I call it Life Music because everything I write has a real human story or emotion within it. The music is telling a story about life.

How would you describe a Life Music artist?

Artists who are influenced by such a wide range of established genres that they're creating something new and different that does not perfectly, easily, or comfortably fit into an existing genre.

Why is Life Music needed?

I recently met a young composer living in LA, trying to make his way as a professional musician. I asked him about his music and the style he wrote. He explained it like this: "It's not really classical, it's kind of modern classical with some influence from film music, it has elements of…" and so on. He was explaining his music using words like "kind of" and "sort of," saying it was similar to this and that without being able to tell me what it really was. His music didn't fit into the already existing genres: classical, jazz, popular. This is why we need Life Music: for the countless composers out there who feel they don't fit into a pre-existing genre.

What do Mozart, Metallica, and Eminem have in common?

They all could have influenced a Life Music artist.

How is Life Music different from Fusion or New Age?

Fusion combines two or more genres and usually refers to jazz-fusion. Life Music does not lean toward any particular style. Think of Life Music as a musical puzzle. New age, fusion, classical, jazz: each is one piece of many that make it whole. It is all-encompassing and open.