BIOGRAPHY

Reflecting on his career as a chemist in the oil industry, as an international banker in Africa, as a university teacher of international economics and finance, and as a senior advisor with the US Foreign Service in Central Europe, at the age of 46, Dubois enrolled in the Western Michigan University Irving S. Gilmore School of Music. His objective was to compose large works that encourage reflection on understanding, mutual respect and respect for the environment.

Dubois holds a degree in Chemistry (MS) from the University of Brussels and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After military service, he worked for a European oil company and worked a decade in the Middle East and Africa division of a major American commercial bank. He was based alternately in New York City and in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, as Head of the bank’s activities in Africa. With a French bank partner, Dubois founded the first commercial bank affiliate of a New York Bank in the People’s Republic of Congo, and was elected to its board.

Subsequently, Dubois taught international business, economics and finance in Michigan. In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Prof. Dubois joined the US Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C. as senior advisor assigned to the oversight of USAID activities in Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and former Yugoslavia.

This international exposure led Dubois to reflect on the humanity that binds us regardless of background and status, and saw that a lack of mutual respect is often an inadvertent by-product of miscommunication at the root of misunderstanding. A few years later, he decided to ‘start over’ and he studied music composition in the neo-classical tradition to express in music concepts of respect and to engage the public. The objective was to encourage non-violence.

In 2019, the world premiere of the full version of the oratorio ‘Requiem for the Fallen' op. 50, was performed at Carnegie Hall, New York. The Oratorio honors the soldiers fallen in World War I. The shorter version premiered in France in 2018 for the centennial of the end of World War I. The full New York version was played in Moscow in 2020 with American Embassy support and, in December 2021, ‘Requiem for the Fallen’ was replayed in Moscow at a public concert for Peace, after the world premier of the Piano Concerto ‘Imagine New York’, op. 39, which I composed on the idea of Freedom. Tragically, the concert took place two months before the invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022. Nevertheless, it remains that, as an artist, I see that our future can only rest on optimism and on non violence.

A month after the invasion, and in this context of search for peace, the performance of the ‘Ave Maria’ op. 29 and the ‘Organ Sonata’ op. 16 took place in Austria during another concert for peace with the financial support of the American Embassy in Vienna. In March 2023, the American Embassy in Moscow cosponsored again a concert for peace at the Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The ‘Ave Maria’ op. 29 and the ‘Organ Sonata’ op. 16 opened the concert. The 2019 to 2023 music events were organized by Lyrica Classic of Washington DC.

Two decades earlier, in 2002, the ‘Organ Sonata’ op. 16, composed in commemoration of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, Pennsylvania and northern Virginia, premiered at the First United Methodist Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In 2004, the ‘Organ Sonata’ was replayed as a commemorative event in France at the cathedral of Lectoure.   *** Besides the oratorio ‘Requiem for the Fallen’ op. 50, Dubois’ major vocal works comprise the ‘Ave Maria’ op. 29, the song cycle ‘Detours of Love’ op. 21, ‘Come Ye Who Love’ op. 43 for soprano, horn and piano, commissioned by Michigan State University. All three were composed for the acclaimed soprano Jacquelyn Wagner. The review of ‘Come Ye Who Love’ in “The Horn Call” reads: “Emmanuel Dubois’ contribution is a hauntingly beautiful work with surprises. The moody opening solo is an extended cantabile, which is then joined by the voice in an interweaving tapestry. […]”

The large Symphonic Cantata, ‘Voices of Hope’, op. 57 (2023), for voice, large percussion section and orchestra, is composed on texts by Native Americans about mutual respect and respect for the environment. It is the composer’s most substantial work on the theme of peace and understanding. The shorter and lighter version on the same texts, the Cantata ‘Tears of the Earth’, op. 62 (2024) is composed for voices (soprano, baritone, choir), small percussion (tubular bells, timpani, marimba) and string ensemble.

*** The Oratorio ‘Requiem for the Fallen’ is based on the wartime poem, ‘In Flanders Fields’, written in 1915 on the battlefield in Belgium by the Canadian military doctor John McCrae. Many decades later, as a teenager, Dubois rode on his bike through the ‘Flanders Fields’, visited the World War I Memorial at the Menen Gate in Ypres, Belgium, and several war cemeteries in Flanders. Years later, in the Ardennes, he visited the sites of the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 - January 25, 1945), when the American war effort, enormously costly in lives, decidedly turned around the outcome of WWII. He also walked the beaches of Belgium and France (‘Omaha Beach’ and ‘Utah Beach’) to reflect on the loss of American and Allied forces during the victorious June 6, 1944 Normandy Landing. On D-Day alone, close to 5,000 Allied troops perished for Freedom on the beaches of Normandy. It is against the background of these sacrifices in loss of lives that the composer expressed his reflections on the tragedy of wars in the oratorio 'Requiem for the Fallen’. The Oratorio honors and recognizes the service of our sons and daughters for their country and for Freedom. The lyrics of the fifth movement, ‘The Children’, composed on a poem by Rudyard Kipling, evoke our children who never came back from the front: ‘Who will return us the children?’

*** The concertante works include the Concerto for Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra ‘Springtime in Chicago’, op. 61; the Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, op. 34; the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra ‘Imagine New York’, op. 39; the Concerto for Trumpet and Strings, op. 40; the variants for Alto Flute and Strings, op. 40a and for Cello and Strings, op. 40b; and the Fantaisie ‘Destination West’, op. 52 for piano and band.

Dubois’ music has been played at over sixty events and festivals in the U.S.A. and in Europe, including the Nuits Musicales en Armagnac Summer Festival; the Jeunes Talents Concert Series (Auditorium Colbert, Paris) under the auspices of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art; the Kauffman Center (Merkin Hall), New York; Carnegie Hall (Weil Hall, Zankel Hall), New York; the Université de Liège; the Stephaniensaal, Graz; Mosfilm Studios, a Moscow art gallery, the Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Tchaikovsky Conservatory.