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Sarah Rimkus, pictured on Presque Isle with her husband, Tom LaVoy, is a composer and instructor of composition and theory at Michigan Tech University. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Rimkus)
Sarah Rimkus
A look at a UP composer’s inspirations
D
r. Sarah Rimkus is the latest addition to the luminous roster of Marquette-connected professional composers. We sat down recently in one of Marquette’s coffee shops to discuss how a freelance composer makes her way. For Rimkus, the spark of music came early with childhood piano lessons, but her first effort at composition was the product of an assignment for Ms. Sullivan’s tenth grade English class in Bainbridge Island, Washington. Asked to produce some sort of creative response to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Rimkus imagined, wrote and performed her soundtrack to a dramatic chapter. The following summer found her writing a string quartet at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; Rimkus had been well and truly bitten by the composing bug. Some of her work was composed both in and for the U.P., including a recent premiere, Heliograph, for Patrick
Story by Katherine Larson Booth (saxophone) and Carrie Biolo (vibraphone) and a work for solo violin for Danielle Simandl, both performed in 2020 at Michigan Technical University’s festival of new music. But much of it has achieved national and international renown. It began when she enrolled at the University of Southern California as a composition major, studying with such luminaries as Morten Lauridsen and Stephen Hartke. Hartke proved an especially powerful influence. “I try to emulate the balance of intellect and intuition that pervades his music,” she said. In addition, Hartke taught her courage. “You just have to get up, do it, be confident in your work and in yourself,” Rimkus said. Rimkus said many composition students who go to USC “think they want to score movies.”
“I quickly realized that wasn’t for me, and I gravitated to choral and vocal music,” she said. “I love working with texts. Music is so abstract; texts allow you to connect the abstraction with concrete ideas, and I’m fascinated by the way that texts and music act together.” She is also “grateful that there is a strong community of choral and vocal musicians with an interest in living composers.” For a person who, like Rimkus, wants to teach, a graduate degree was essential, so after earning her Bachelor’s of Music magna cum laude she went to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland to study first with Paul Mealor and then with Phillip Cooke. There she also met fellow composer Thomas LaVoy, now her husband and the reason Rimkus came to Marquette. In Aberdeen, Rimkus truly found her voice, focusing on choral music. “I wanted to do it in my own way ...
September 2021
Marquette Monthly
47
