Katherine Quittner is a composer of music, an A-list Hollywood Music Editor for feature films
for 20 years, and the inventor of The Magnetica. She has been writing music all her life.
Her formal musical education began with piano lessons at the age of 7, and continued at UCLA
where she was a student of music composition. While writing original music for the theater,
dance and for films, she studied privately with the following teachers: Paul Glass (composition):
Paul Glass was a student of Witold Lutoslawski and Goffredo Petrassi (who taught Ennio
Morricone and Peter Maxwell Davies), and Hugo Friedhofer (orchestration): Hugo Friedhofer
was Max Steiner’s orchestrator and won an Oscar for “The Best Years of Our Lives” .
At UCLA, her film composition teachers were David Raksin (Laura) and Lalo Schifrin
(Mission Impossible).
While at UCLA, she won the Atwater-Kent prize for Chamber Music for her composition:
“Sicut Erat” for chamber orchestra and voices, and then the Henri Mancini Film Music
Composition Prize for “Landscape with Angeles”. She began scoring for films with “Bassi In
Jail”; “And I Don’t Mean Maybe” and finally the documentary “Landscape with Angeles” by
Margaret Bach (founder the Los Angeles Conservancy).
Following her studies at UCLA, she spent 5 years in living Berlin while attending the
Univerisat der Kunste, as a student in the master class of Professor Isang Yun.
She returned to the United States and won the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts
Composer Fellowship.
She began a career as a music editor in Hollywood specializing in designing and editing Temp
Scores for feature films, which are the scores first seen with the movie by the studio executives
and the recruited test audiences, and which so often become the template which the composer
follows in writing the final music. Her work includes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Father of
the Bride, A River Runs Through It, Boomerang, Bram Stokers Dracula, Mrs. Doubtfire,
Quiz Show, The Great White Hype, City of Angeles, Step Mom, Bicentennial Man, Man on the
Moon, Big Momma’s House and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
A full list of her movie credits both in editing and composition, can be found at the IMDb.com
In 2006 she left the movies and moved in 2008 to Montevideo, Uruguay where she lived for
6 years while she constructed The Magnetica.
