The musicology area acknowledges its unique position among the rich cultures found in the Pacific region and seeks to embrace a robust and globalized perspective of the field. To this end, the degree of Master of Arts in Music, with musicology focus, is a comprehensive and current program that reflects the discipline’s historical position while engaging with new directions in the discipline at large.
The musicology faculty are committed to exposing students to a variety of methodologies in historical musicology. Faculty expertise ranges from medieval music theory in Europe to American film music, affording students a foundation for studies from multiple perspectives. The musicology area strongly encourages a cross-examination of methods and approaches from the discipline of ethnomusicology, facilitated by the superb faculty and facilities in ethnomusicology at the Music Department. This multifaceted approach of the degree programs prepares students for a variety of subsequent pursuits, whether these be in service to a local community, academic work, or careers in the music industry.
More information on studying musicology at the University of Hawaii-Manoa:
Musicology Faculty
Dr. Kate McQuiston
Associate Professor of Music
Area Head
Graduate Studies Chair
Kate McQuiston’s main research area is music in film, with foci on directorial and compositional style, the use of preexisting music, the concept of originality, and music in biopics.
She is the author of “We’ll Meet Again”: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Oxford University Press, 2013), an archival and analytical study of music in Kubrick’s films. Her latest research appears in Literature/Film Quarterly, the Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Music and the Moving Image.
Dr. McQuiston has recently been an invited speaker at the San Francisco Symphony and at conferences and universities in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, London, Leiden, Seoul, Tokyo, and Auckland. She earned her MA and PhD at Columbia University.
Dr. Elina G. Asato Hamilton
Assistant Professor of Music
Dr. Elina Hamilton is a historical musicologist whose research explores the history of music theory in fourteenth-century England. Her work on the intersection between theoretical texts and musical sources focuses on the interaction of theorists among themselves, with other musicians, and with main-stream thoughts in the Middle Ages. Her current project concentrates on the years between 1280 and 1360 to illustrate how shifts of thought in England transformed the way theorists discussed music in the time when the so-called Ars nova style flourished. Her research is published in Studi musicali, Musica Disciplina, Notes, and in several edited volumes. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, she taught courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Dr. Hamilton has presented research at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, at the International Musicological Society Quinquennial Conference, Medieval and Renaissance Music Conferences, and at institutions including Oxford University, University of St. Andrews, Charles University, Princeton University, MIT, and Yale University, among others. She is an editorial board member of the East Asian Journal of Popular Music and was featured recently on the blog maintained by the Committee on the Status of Women for the Society of Music Theory.
Dr. Hamilton received her Ph.D. and master’s degrees from Bangor University in Wales, UK, where she was awarded a Draper’s Medal for Outstanding Postgraduate Study, one of six awarded in the London-based guild’s 600-year history. She organized several international conferences at Bangor University, including a conference on the discussion of innovative music notation (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) and several workshops on the history of medieval music theory. While at Bangor University, Dr. Hamilton also advocated for the promotion of new music and was festival manager for the annual Bangor New Music Festival. She received her BM in piano performance from Portland State University where she studied piano with Harold Gray and Susan Chan.
Dr. Hamilton was born and raised in Japan and is a native speaker of Japanese. When she is not gazing at medieval manuscripts or finding marginalized histories to write about, she can be found in the kitchen cooking Japanese or Italian foods and enjoys travelling to new places to discover new cultures.
Dr. Valeria Wenderoth
Lecturer in Music
Valeria Wenderoth earned her M.A and then her Ph.D. in Musicology (2004) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa after studies at the Conservatory of Music in Perugia, Italy, where she received the Diploma of Classical Guitar (Superior Level) in 1985. Her research interests are nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, with particular focus on the association between text and music and on social and political issues. After her doctoral studies she was invited to read her papers at local, regional, national, and international conferences. Besides publishing a textbook on twentieth-century music, Dr. Wenderoth also wrote music criticism for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. She was a fellow at the Institute of Music and Opera (2007), sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Colombia Graduate School of Journalism.
Since 2001 Dr. Wenderoth has offered courses at UHM on music history, music of the Romantic era and music appreciation. She has also taught Italian language and culture as well as Italian film. In addition, she worked at the UHM Center for Teaching Excellence.