Marjorie Rusche
b. 1949
Marjorie M. Rusche is an internationally performed award winning contemporary classical composer who combines romantic, modernist, and vernacular influences in her music. Dr. Rusche composes for opera, music theater, orchestra, chorus, a variety of vocal and instrumental chamber ensembles, soloists, dance, and theatre.
Her opera Our American Odyssey premiered in 2023, produced by the South Bend Lyric Opera in piano-vocal form. The Gamboling Girl, a South Bend Symphony Orchestra commission, premiered in January 2022. Commissioned by oboist Jennet Ingle, Dreams and Visions (Searching the Shadows) for oboe, viola, and piano, premiered in January 2020 with subsequent performances throughout northwestern IN and southwestern MI in February and March 2020. Songs of Love and Death for soprano and piano premiered at the Fourth Annual International Music by Women Festival, Mississippi University for Women, Columbus, MS.; song cycle excerpts were premiered at a New York City Underworld Productions Opera CrossCURRENT concert. She was a guest composer with Musica Reginae Productions, New York City and was honored as a guest composer at the 13th London New Music for Winds Festival, in London, England. Her compositions have been performed live and on radio in Amsterdam, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, San Francisco, Vienna, Denmark, Kenya, Spain, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, and Wisconsin, her birth state.
Dr. Rusche is affiliated with ASCAP, New Music USA, Opera America, College Music Society, and is a charter member of the American Composers Forum (aka Minnesota Composers Forum).
She currently teaches or has taught music composition, orchestration, opera history, music theory, form & analysis, music history, and piano at Indiana University South Bend, the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, Colombia College Chicago and Southwestern Michigan College. She also taught in Kenya while serving in the U.S. Peace Corps. She earned her D.M. in Music Composition from the Jacobs School of Music Indiana University-Bloomington, and her M.A. in Music Composition & Theory from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis.
Biography taken from composer’s website.
