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Kate McQuiston

Kate McQuiston, associate professor of music at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, presents “Musical Re-creation and Recreation in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel” on Thursday, September 17, 11:30 a.m. in Hamilton Library Room 301 as part of the UH Mānoa Faculty Lecture Series.

In director Wes Anderson’s two most recent films, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, existing musical works fill the soundtrack in new and remarkable ways. Rather than appearing as isolated quotations, old pieces of music inspire novel responses by Anderson and his creative team, including substantial contributions by composer Alexandre Desplat.

McQuiston traces the treatment of music in Anderson’s films to show how this close correspondence between the old and new has emerged and considers the implications of such an approach for the role of existing music in contemporary film.

Her main research areas are music in film, twentieth-century music and the philosophy of music. She is the author of We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Oxford University Press, 2013) and articles in Music, Sound, and Filmmakers: Sonic Style in Cinema (Routledge, 2012) and The Journal of Film Music.

Next in the Faculty Lecture Series

Hōkūleʻa Worldwide Voyage: Island Wisdom and Global Connections in Ethnomathematics,” by Linda Furuto, associate professor of mathematics education on Thursday, October 1, 11:30 a.m. in Hamilton Library Room 301.

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