Ellen Bakulina
Associate Professor
Ellen Bakulina is Associate Professor of Music Theory in the Department of Music Research at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. Dr. Bakulina specializes in tonal music; her specific areas of expertise include form analysis, meter studies, theories of tonality, Schenkerian analysis, Russian music and music theory, and the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff. She has degrees from the College of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory (theory, 2003), McGill (BMus 2007 and MA 2010), and the CUNY Graduate Center (PhD 2015). Her doctoral dissertation, on Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil and theories of tonal pairing, was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Before McGill, Bakulina taught at Brooklyn College (CUNY), the Yale Department of Music, and the University of North Texas. She has taught a broad range of graduate and undergraduate courses; additionally, she served as coordinator of the first-year musicianship program at Yale, and at UNT supervised doctoral dissertations and a Master’s thesis.
Bakulina has published articles in various peer-review journals (including the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, Intersections, Theory and Practice, Integral, and Theoria), as well as in the edited collection Analytical Approaches to 20th-Century Russian Music, and she regularly peer-reviews articles and books by others. She has presented numerous papers at the Society for Music Theory and various international and regional conferences, including MusCan and EuroMAC. She has given guest lectures at the Texas State University San Marcos, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, and at the Schulich School. For SMT, Ellen has chaired the Russian Music Theory Interest Group (2019–22) and served on the Professional Development Committee (2018–21); she will join the Graduate Student Paper Award Committee in 2022.
Ellen is a pianist and a choral singer. As a chorister, she has performed with the MSO chorus, Choeur St. Laurent, and Orpheus Singers. She also loves historical sewing and is a self-taught player on the Celtic harp.
