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©Nick Ruechel
Manhatta, New York, contemporary and ancestral homelands of the Canarsie, Munsee Lenape, and Wappinger people
(Garni, Armenia, 2015, during 100-year commemoration of the Armenian Genocide) photo copyright ©Michelle Andonian
“Fragile, whalesong moans usurped by powerful harmonies, offering an extraordinary interface between the traditional and avant-garde”
—New Zealand HERALD
“A painter who knows exactly where her picture will be hung”
—New York Times
“Held rapt by an intense, luminous American composer”
—Los Angeles TIMES
Since 2003, the music of post-style composer, sound-artist, 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.
“Powerfully evocative music with a rich sense of harmony and color”
—Brooklyn Rail
At home at any venue, Alexandra du Bois’ music has been performed in concert halls and music spaces 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: De Oosterpoort, Groningen, the Netherlands; The Barbican, London; Carnegie Hall, New York City; Khachaturian Concert Hall, Yerevan, Armenia; Lincoln Center, New York City; Théàtre de la Ville, Paris; Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; Centro Kursaal, San Sebastián, Spain; Hanoi Opera House, Ha Noi, Vietnam; Boston Museum of Science; Teatro Gran Rex, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Smetana Hall, Prague, Czech Republic; Zipper Hall, Los Angeles; City Recital Hall Angel Place, Sydney, Australia; Auckland Town Hall, New Zealand; Muziekcentrum, Eindhoven; and the Nikolaisaal Potsdam, Germany; Salle Cortot, Paris, among others.
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).
“Gorgeous, haunting”
—Brooklyn Rail
Alexandra du Bois’ music is actively performed in arts and public spaces, music places, concert halls and 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).
Stream Alexandra du Bois on SoundCloud
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.
“Evocative… Pure emo”
—New York TIMES
photo credit: Jeremy Dennis
“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
Her music been released on record labels including Harmonia Mundi, Navona Recordings, Perspectives Recordings, Kronos Quartet Recordings, Parma Recordings, and Arabesque Records labels.
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, inclusion, expansion, and positive expansive change. Descriptions such as “composer” were limited to certain groups before the 21st century. She strives to reduce and bring understanding to the gatekeeping of the word.
Alexandra 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 with organizations and individuals including Project Spectrum and Philip Ewell. While these curriculum changes launched in 2021, the work is on-going.
Her recent commissions include those from Duo Manoukian Jousselme – Paris; 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.
photo credit: Eva Soltes
photo credit: Jeremy Dennis
“A painter who knows exactly where her picture will be hung”
—New York Times
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.
At the heart of chamber music can sometimes be the home (chambers within it). During 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 chamber music) and other small, intimate spaces, in connection to works of the common practice European classical cannon written for similar purposes by artists during the common practice period.
Her music 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.
“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
photo credit: Erika McCarthy
Dr. du Bois 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 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, Oculus pro oculo totum orbem terrae caecat, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind (the title, a quote frequently but mistakenly attributed to M.K. Gandhi) was written during the months leading up to the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the piece is a protest quartet against that invasion. 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).
“A stunning piece that explored the landscape of war and conflict with a sorrowful tone of foreboding, chaos and devastation”
—BBC
“Fragile, whalesong moans usurped by powerful harmonies, offering an extraordinary interface between the traditional and avant-garde”
—New Zealand HERALD
“An impressively sustained essay in musical melancholy”
—THE GUARDIAN, London
Alexandra du Bois’ compositions often draw from the human narrative. Her composition In Beauty, for double choir (women’s choir and children’s choir) and chamber ensemble, was commissioned by Present Music in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. She wrote the work in honor of and with respect for the Navajo people. The work attempts to draw awareness towards the seemingly unending injustice inflicted upon Native Americans by European colonizers.
Alexandra du Bois’ connection to intimate, non-amplified works, sometimes referred to as 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 in Virginia Beach. 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. 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.
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.
After living in New York City for close to fourteen years, Alexandra has lived in Vermont since 2019 where she lives with her husband. She creates music on and benefits directly from residing on the traditional and spiritual lands of the Abenaki Nation, taken without consent, and other indigenous communities. She is a member of BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) and self-publishes her music – with the exception of one work, Behind Rainbows, made available to Kronos Quartet for 50 for the Future, Kronos Quartet’s education and legacy project, a free learning library of repertoire of new works for young string quartets.