Alex Bádue

Alex Bádue is a musicologist specialized in musical theater, American music history, and Latin American music. His research concentrates on the American musical as a genre and examines musical and dramatic aesthetics, conventions, and originalities that different composers, lyricists, and book writers employed to create musicals in different decades of the 20th and 21st centuries.

His main focus is the sung-through musical, and the compositional processes, musical structures, reception, and social impact of musicals by Jason Robert Brown, William Finn, Michael John LaChiusa, Jonathan Larson, and Jeanine Tesori. He also conducts research on the interactions between Latin-American and U.S. American popular music industries.

Recent Courses Taught

The Broadway Musical
Art of Active Listening
From Bach to Bartók
Intro to Music Theory
Advanced Topics in Music Theory

Select Publications

• “Queer Performance and Indecent Theology in the Gospel according to Porta dos Fundos,” co-authored with Jeff Jay. Theology and Sexuality 28 (July 2023).
• “Crossing Over Popular and Classical Traditions Through Musical Theater.” Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom: Crossover, Exchange, Appropriation, edited by Esther Morgan-Ellis (New York: Routledge, 2024), 179–96.
• Why Aren’t They Talking? The Sung Through Musical from the 1980s to the 2010s. Elements of Musical Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• “Inimitable City: Assimilation and Adaptation of Foreign Musical Theatre in Rio de Janeiro,” The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre, 383–85. New York: Routledge, 2023.    
• “Animated Broadway: Disney and Musical Theater in the 1990s and early 2000s,” co-authored with Rebecca S. Schorsch. American Music, Vol. 39, no. 2 (2021): 212–25.
• “The Sung and the Spoken in Michael John LaChiusa’s Musicals.” The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, 97–105. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• “Performing Gender, Sexuality, and Jewishness in the Songs of William Finn’s Musical Falsettoland (1990).” Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 38, no. 2 (2019): 159–178.

Professional Affiliations

American Musicological Society
Society for American Music

Appointed to the Faculty

2022

Educational Background

Ph.D., University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music
M.M., University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music
B.M., Federal University of Paraná