VSO Features Vermont Composer Alexandra du Bois

Alexandra du Bois Credit: Courtesy of Jeremy Dennis

Vermont composer Alexandra du Bois‘ work has been performed in major concert halls across five continents, but only once in the state she calls home. That will change this Saturday, May 10, when a fanfare by du Bois will open the Vermont Symphony Orchestra‘s season finale concert at the Flynn in Burlington.

Her brief but searing Fanfare for Orchestra, which premiered in 2009, will hold its own alongside a second woman’s work, the late Vancouver composer Jocelyn Morlock’s My Name Is Amanda Todd, which won Canada’s 2018 JUNO Award for classical composition. The two pieces will be followed by the main event of the night, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.

It’s always a challenge to choose the other music on a program that includes the Titan, as Mahler’s First is known. The late Romantic composer saw his work as no less than a heroic search for meaning, and he called for monumental instrumentation. The VSO will perform it with 82 musicians, including a staggering eight French horns, five trumpets and four trombones.

The occasion is also momentous because the orchestra has performed a Mahler symphony only a handful of times in its 90-year history, according to music director Andrew Crust.

“Mahler is an epic experience. It’s truly not missable,” he said.

Crust chose du Bois’ fanfare, which he describes as “broad and chorale-like with rich orchestration,” partly because it makes good use of that brass section. Inspired by the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, Fanfare for Orchestra both celebrates the Civil Rights Movement and mourns its embattled legacy with a central dirge that pays homage to the movement’s most famous tune, “We Shall Overcome.”

In fact, “the whole program could be called ‘We Shall Overcome,'” Crust said. Composer Morlock’s work is about Todd, a high school student in British Columbia who died by suicide in 2012 at age 15 after suffering years of online bullying and in-person abuse. Members of the Me2 Orchestra, a Burlington ensemble for people with mental illness, will join VSO musicians to perform the work. And Mahler was attempting to overcome a failed relationship with soprano Johanna Richter as well as the fear of writing his first symphony, Crust added.

During a phone call with Seven Days, du Bois offered a less sympathetic take on Mahler. That composer may have had his difficulties, she said — including his Jewishness, which resulted in the Nazis banning “his beautiful music.” But, she pointed out, he also threatened his future wife, “‘If you continue to write music, I will divorce you.'” Du Bois was referring to Mahler’s ultimatum to Alma Schindler — whom he courted while composing his fifth symphony — that she must give up penning music before marrying him.

“I generally counted Mahler among my favorite music until I did a deep dive into his life, and I no longer listen to him with pleasure,” du Bois said, adding that her comment was not a criticism of the VSO’s programming.

Du Bois, 43, came to the profession without any female role models. A violinist from the age of 2, she grew up in Virginia and started writing music early but recalls that when her mother suggested she was a composer, she was confused. She later realized the comment hadn’t made sense because she had never been to a classical music concert featuring the work of a female composer. Until college, she had never performed music by a woman, despite playing in youth orchestras from age 12 and giving countless concerts with her studio teacher.

Du Bois gained instant fame as a 20-year-old sophomore at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music when the Kronos Quartet performed her work. “Suddenly, everyone in New York knew my name,” she recalled. She later moved there and earned a master’s at the Juilliard School and a doctorate at Stony Brook University. Since 2020, she has chaired the composition and theory department at the Longy School of Music at Bard College.

She commutes there from the Green Mountains, where she has lived since 2018. She declined to identify the town she lives in, saying she has safety concerns because of President Donald Trump’s attacks on academia.

Du Bois is an activist whose efforts extend beyond her music; she has, for example, introduced new curricula at Longy that encompass more varied music styles than conservatories typically teach.

“Her music is a beautiful manifestation of her view and hope for the world.” Matthew Evan Taylor

In line with her principles, du Bois calls herself a “post-style composer” and embraces inclusivity in a way her own conservatory education did not. (She counts as a major influence the music of the West African country of Mali.) Even labeling her music as contemporary or modern “has the stigma of being distant from reality, entrenched in academia, in white spaces,” she said.

Matthew Evan Taylor, a Black composer and former Middlebury College professor who now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, called du Bois “one of the most vital composers working today” in an email. “Her music is a beautiful manifestation of her view and hope for the world, with the depth of someone who studies and thinks extensively about the human condition.”

Du Bois said she now sees Fanfare for Orchestra in a different light because, as a country, “we’re just reversing the small gains we’ve made” since she composed it. “My relationship to the piece has only deepened, because it stands for what matters in music and in life. [While] we have to acknowledge that, for some people, it has been horrifying all along,” she noted, referring to American society before diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, “what is happening in the country is worse today.”

In that sense, du Bois’ fanfare is a necessary balance to Mahler. Audiences will hear a work that represents what music can mean to a society before being immersed in one man’s personal search for meaning.

The original print version of this article was headlined “A Musical Movement | The VSO’s season finale opens with an electrifying work about civil rights by local composer Alexandra du Bois”