Research

MAKULUMY ALEXANDER-HILLS recently completed his PhD at Columbia University. His scholarship considers popular musical theater through a variety of lenses and theoretical frameworks. His dissertation, “Engaging with Musical Theater Practitioners’ Vernacular Musical Knowledge as Music-Theoretical Practice,” expands on other recent work, including:

  • the interacting notions of the “white racial frame” in both musical theater and it’s attempted analysis

  • the virtual liveness of the Broadway pit orchestra

  • exploring “vernacular musical knowledge” through ethnographic efforts

  • the notion of “the work” with respect to musical theater

  • performance of gender and sexuality in “miscast” cabarets

  • investigations of harmony in Adam Guettel’s Floyd Collins

  • prospective methodologies for describing the musical sublime in Jason Robert Brown’s songs

  • describing the phenomenological experience of hearing similarity

  • the interactive multiple temporalities of musical theater in performance

Makulumy is also a co-chair for the Musical Theater Interest Group in the Society of Music Theory (2022-2024).

Publications

  • “Audio Mediation Technology and Liveness in Modern Musical Theatre Performance,” Studies in Musical Theatre (2022) [ACCESS LINK]

Conference Presentations

  • “‘It Sounds like “Broadway’: Investigating the Role of Arrangers in (Re)Creating the ‘Broadway Sound’”

    Presented at Song Stage and Screen 2024, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, June 2024

  • “‘Bluegrass Meets Bartok?’ Analyzing Adam Guettel’s Harmonic Tools in the Off-Broadway Musical Floyd Collins”

    Presented to the Musical Theater Interest Group Meeting at the SMT Virtual Conference, November 2021

    Presented at the Western University Graduate Symposium on Music, August 2021

  • “A Strange Loop: Rethinking Analytical Assumptions While Studying Black Musical Theater”

    Presented at the AMS Virtual Conference, November 2021

    Presented at the University of Connecticut Graduate Music Conference 2021

  • “Was Musical Theater Truly Live? Is it Now? Audio Mediation and the Virtual Liveness of the Pit Orchestra”

    Presented at the McGill Music Graduate Students’ Society Symposium 2021

  • “Is Broadway Live? Audio Mediation and the Virtual Liveness of the Pit Orchestra”

    Accepted to the Song, Stage, and Screen XV, originally scheduled for June 2020 [cancelled]

    Presented to the “Telephone Hour: A Musical Theatre Quarantine Colloquium” organized by the Musical

    Theatre/Dance Focus Group of the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education), Summer 2020

  • “Comparative Scholarship: Moving Beyond Suggestive Music Theory”

    Presented at the CUNY Graduate Students in Music Conference 2020

Teaching/Pedagogy

MA Tutor, Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts (2023-current)

  • Advising and marking Master’s of Arts students musical theatre and music direction dissertation project development, research, and writing

Graduate Teaching Fellow, Columbia University (2020-2022)

  • Fundamentals of Music (introduction to musical concepts: scale, mode, rhythm, meter, harmony, notation)

Teaching Assistant, Columbia University (2019-2022)

  • The American Musical (undergraduate historical survey course of American musical theater)

  • Music Theory I (species counterpoint, figured bass, triads and sevenths, simple harmonic functionality and progressions)

  • Music Theory II (chorale writing, secondary dominants, foreground and background analysis, formal structures)

  • Music Theory IV (chromatic harmony, post-tonal theory, topics in rhythm and meter, timbre studies)

  • Salsa, Soca, & Reggae (undergraduate survey course of Caribbean and Latin-American music styles)

Teaching Assistant, Stanford University (2015-2016)

  • Ear-Training and Musicianship II/III/IV (tonal and atonal melodies and progressions, sight-singing and dictation)

Affiliations

Society of Music Theory

Society of Music Theory - Musical Theater Interest Group (co-chair)

American Musicology Society

Engaged Music Theory Working Group

Degrees and Qualifications

Ph.D. in Music Theory, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (2024)

M.Phil. in Music Theory, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (2021)

M.A. in Music Theory, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (2020)

B.A. in Music with Honors and Distinction, concentration in conducting, STANFORD UNIVERSITY (2016)

B.S. in Earth Systems with Distinction, concentration in biosphere sciences, STANFORD UNIVERSITY (2016)