(Manhattan, New York) copyright © Nick Ruechel
(Garni, Armenia) copyright © Michelle Andonian
“A stunning piece that explored the landscape of war and conflict with a sorrowful tone of foreboding, chaos and devastation”
—BBC
“An intense, luminous American composer”
—Los Angeles TIMES
“Evocative… Pure emo”
—New York TIMES
“An impressively sustained essay in musical melancholy”
—THE GUARDIAN, London
“Fragile, whalesong moans usurped by powerful harmonies, offering an extraordinary interface between the traditional and avant-garde”
—New Zealand HERALD
“Gorgeous, haunting”
—Brooklyn Rail
The music of post-style composer, educator, and activist Alexandra du Bois (Ph.D. Stony Brook University; M.M. The Juilliard School; B.M. Indiana University Jacobs School of Music) is often propelled by issues of indifference and inequality throughout the United States and the world and has been performed at venues across five continents—connecting her tangibly to issues and imagery that inform her work as a music creator, activist, educator, and post-style artist.
Kronos Quartet founder and first violinist, David Harrington, described the music of du Bois in 2003 as having “found a voice when many people were speechless” who writes music that “attempts to be a conscience in a time of oblivion. She dared to counter abuses of moral authority with an internal, personal sound using the string quartet as a witness, a reminder, that music and creativity are part of a continuing web of responsibility” (Strings Magazine).
Alexandra du Bois’ music has been performed in concert halls across the United States and throughout France, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Austria, Armenia, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Canada, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. Her music has made its home in concert halls and other performance spaces including: Carnegie Hall, New York City; Théàtre de la Ville, Paris; the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; De Oosterpoort, Groningen, the Netherlands; Lincoln Center, New York City; Hanoi Opera House, Ha Noi, Vietnam; The Barbican, London; Teatro Gran Rex, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Smetana Hall, Prague, Czech Republic; Zipper Hall, Los Angeles; Centro Kursaal, San Sebastián, Spain; City Recital Hall Angel Place, Sydney, Australia; Khachaturian Concert Hall, Yerevan, Armenia; Auckland Town Hall, New Zealand; Muziekcentrum, Eindhoven; and the Nikolaisaal Potsdam, Germany; Salle Cortot, Paris; Boston Museum of Science; among others.
Dr. du Bois (she/her) is currently Chair of the Composition and Theory Department at the Longy School of Music of Bard College where she also maintains a Composition Studio. As Chair of the Theory Department, she has worked since 2020 to develop and bring into existence new curricula for both the undergraduate and graduate student bodies at Longy, ushering in a two new curricula while working closely with organizations and individuals including Project Spectrum and Philip Ewell. These curriculum changes launched in 2021 and the work is on-going.
Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA in 1981 on unceded traditional Chesapeake land but a Northeast U.S. coast resident for most of her life, Alexandra du Bois found her early musical voice through the violin, beginning lessons at the age of two years old. After a move to rural Virginia, on the unceded traditional land of the Nansemond Nation, after growing up by the sea, she began hearing music in the natural world around her. It was this intimate connection to oceanic landscapes, the natural world, and reflection combined with solitude that inspired her to begin writing and underscores her music to this day. Music was always personal and necessary.
“Evokes nature with Messiaen-like birdsong, and spirit with marvelous overlapping sonorities—a kind of music of the spheres for our own time”
—Milwaukee Magazine
As an educator, artist, and activist, she is committed to the simultaneous decolonization of classical music and reclaiming and energizing of classical music through the process of awareness, acknowledgement, expansion, and positive expansive change. Descriptions such as “composer” are limiting in the 21st century. She strives to reduce the gatekeeping of the word by raising awareness of its use (or lack thereof).
Her original works and arrangements have been released on record labels including Harmonia Mundi, Kronos Quartet, Navona Recordings, Perspectives Recordings, Parma Recordings, and Arabesque Records labels.
Her music is actively performed in arts and public spaces, music places, concert halls, and venues across five continents.Her commissioned works range from extra-musical (works with field recordings, live electronics, spoken word) to orchestral (symphonic, chamber, and string orchestras) to collaborative (photojournalists, choreographers, playwrights, visual artists, video artists, and filmmakers) to chamber music (solo, duo, trio, quartet, and quintet without conductor) to voice (a cappella choir, double and triple choir, voice and piano, and chamber vocal ensemble). At the heart of chamber music is the home (chambers within it); during this, the start of the decolonization of classical music, du Bois also completes commissions from individuals commissioning chamber works for performance for private events in homes (or chambers) and other small, intimate spaces, in honor of the revered works of the classical cannon written for the same purposes by white European male artists during the common practice period.
Her recent commissions include those from TONEDMELISMA – Münich; Cramer Quartet – New York; Riot Ensemble – London; Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center – New York; Institut Curie – Paris; Kronos Quartet – San Francisco, as well as those from Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Anchorage Symphony Orchestra, The Beaux Arts Trio, Kronos Quartet, Apollo Chamber Players, Parhelion Trio, Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings, Savannah Music Festival with Daniel Hope & Friends, MTNA Music Teachers National Association, Present Music with the Milwaukee Choral Artists and the Milwaukee Children’s Choir, PALS Children’s Chorus – Boston, Southwest Chamber Music, New York Classical Players, Bargemusic, Merkin Concert Hall, Bang on a Can Festival, Azure Ensemble, MAYA Trio, The University of Massachusetts at Boston’s Chorus and Chamber Singers, and the Piano Project at the Kaufman Center, among others. Further performances of du Bois’ previously commissioned works include those presented by ensembles such as JACK Quartet, Radius Ensemble, Neave Trio, Beaux Arts Trio, Felici Trio, Asheville Symphony Orchestra, Tallahassee Symphony, Fort Dodge Symphony Orchestra, Richmond Philharmonic, Orchestra, Mimesis Ensemble, Divergent Studio, Lost Dog New Music Ensemble, ALIAS Chamber Ensemble, Serenata of Santa Fe, Boston Festival Orchestra Chamber Players, Boston Conservatory Orchestra, Syzygy New Music, Tribeca New Music Festival, neoLit, Duplexity, Serenata of Santa Fe, American Modern Ensemble, the Chun Sisters and New Music Detroit, among many others.
Her work has been recognized with awards from the Netherland-America Foundation, BMI Foundation, The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, NewMusicUSA, New York State Council on the Arts, Kronos: Under 30 Project, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, NewMusicUSA, NYSCA, University of Vermont, and The Juilliard School, among many others.
She has previously been composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall (through the Weill Institute’s Professional Training Workshop Kronos: Signature Works), Dartmouth College, Merkin Concert Hall, Mammoth Lakes Music Festival and with Southwest Chamber Music throughout Los Angeles and Vietnam. She has also been invited for residences at Harrison House Music, Arts & Ecology (Joshua Tree, California), The Hermitage (Manasota Key, Florida), Byrdcliffe (Woodstock, New York), and Marble House Project (Dorset, Vermont).
“It’s a virtue that du Bois’ music is simple without being simplistic, maintaining a buoyant intensity that doesn’t wear you out ”
—Gramophone Magazine
Alexandra du Bois’ connection to chamber music began at an early age through her connection to the violin and is often inspired by the sea and her childhood spent seaside. Before she was described as “one of America’s most promising young composers,” (LA Times) du Bois had been commissioned by Kronos Quartet—at that time the youngest composer ever to be commissioned by the quartet at age twenty-one years old. The ensemble subsequently commissioned her first, third, fifth, and seventh string quartets and released the first commercial recording of first quartet, Oculus (An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind). Du Bois is also the youngest composer ever commissioned by legendary pianist Menahem Pressler with the Beaux Arts Trio who premiered her first piano at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam when du Bois was twenty-three years old.
“One of America’s most promising young composers ”
—Los Angeles Times
Alexandra du Bois was composer-in-residence with Grammy-award winning Southwest Chamber Music as they toured Vietnam and Los Angeles as part of the Ascending Dragon Music Festival—a project described by the U.S. State Department as the largest cultural exchange between the U.S. and Vietnam in history. Southwest Chamber Music commissioned du Bois’ Within Earth, Wood Grows featuring the Vietnamese monochord, the đàn bầu. The world premiere at the Hanoi Opera House in Vietnam was reviewed by Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times:
She has an unerring sense of beauty, and her new score began with the accrual of melody in slow, soft, overlapping layers, the way Mahler did in his most affecting adagios. But also like Mahler, she revealed innocence as always an illusion. In her program notes she spoke of overcoming mental images of Vietnamese afflicted with the results of Agent Orange and of American war veterans wounded in Vietnam or haunted by memories. Sweetness never left her score, but beauty and pain intermingled. A bass line provided a heartbeat, and beguiling melodic lines led through a maze of dead ends. The ending was a stunner – a scream became a spiritual cadence, as if giving thanks for sour, sensuous fruit.
For du Bois, music is at its core song and dance—yet music is also an internal dance within oneself where one can find solace and understanding. After receiving a grant from the Netherland-America Foundation to retrace the footsteps of young Dutch writer and Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, du Bois wrote Night Songs (Nachtliederen), a 30-minute quartet commissioned by Kronos Quartet—described by the New York Times as “well-made and deeply sincere.” Molly Sheridan, in NewMusicBox, offers a deeper description:
The composer…reading Hillesum’s work and visiting Amsterdam, [Kamp] Westerbrook, and Auschwitz [Birkenau] to step as close to the Dutch Jew’s wartime life experience as possible. The music born of this was starkly touching, conveying the complexity of individual human darkness rather than the epic turmoil of nations in a time of genocide.
“Well-made and deeply sincere”
—The New York TIMES
Championed by conductor Randall Craig Fleischer, du Bois wrote Fanfare for orchestra—inspired by and dedicated to the inauguration of the first African-American to hold the office of President of the United States. The Anchorage Symphony Orchestra premiered the work in 2009. Conductor Marin Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra commissioned her orchestral work Beneath Boundaries, which was premiered in collaboration with NPR’s Kitchen Sisters’ multimedia project sharing stories of women and girls from diverse cultures. Du Bois’ Beneath Boundaries, in particular, was inspired by the photography of Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian.
“Americana turned ugly and mean but resolved into hymnal peace and a return to nature”
—Los Angeles TIMES
Du Bois’ first commission from Kronos Quartet, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind (the title, a quote frequently attributed to M.K. Gandhi) was written during the months leading up to the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq. During its premieres, the work was praised as “an impressively sustained essay in musical melancholy” (The Guardian, London), “a stunning piece that explored the landscape of war and conflict with a sorrowful tone of foreboding, chaos and devastation” (BBC Manchester), an “anti-war placard,” (New York Times) and as an “astonishing work, written when the composer was in her early 20s, [which] seems deeper with each hearing” (LA Times).
Alexandra du Bois’ compositions often draw from the human narrative. In Beauty, May I Walk, for double choir and chamber ensemble, commissioned by Present Music in Milwaukee, was written to honor and respect and pay tribute to the Navajo people. In essence, the work draws upon the seemingly unending injustice inflicted upon Native Americans by European colonizers. The Navajo Nightway ceremonies’ spiritual practice of restoring balance and harmony is one the brings hope to the composer.
“A piece [informed] by the concentration-camp testimony of the Dutch writer Etty Hillesum is driven by strong feeling and by darkly pulsing, Janáček-like melodies”
—The New Yorker
Because history repeats without education and awareness, du Bois’ second attempt to meditate on genocide, sonically, was for her 2015 work, Hope Dies Last (a nonet for winds and strings commissioned by the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings for trombonist David Jackson and violinist Ida Kavafian), du Bois travelled throughout the Armenian countryside with prize-winning photojournalist and artist Michelle Andonian in creative preparation for 45-min work which acknowledges the 100th commemoration of the Armenian Genocide in 2015–one of the first genocides of the 20th century.
After living in New York City for close to fourteen years, she is now a Vermont resident, where she lives with her husband Ely, a green architect, and halves her time between the unceded Abenaki territory (Vermont) and unceded Massachusett territory (Massachusetts), in order to receive viridian and creative oxygen she long-missed in NYC.
Alexandra du Bois creates on and benefits directly from residing on the traditional and spiritual lands of the Abenaki taken without consent, of this nation and other indigenous communities.
She is a member of BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) and self-publishes her music.