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loCals katherine larSon
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
Dr. 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 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 ...
Story by Katherine Larson
Rimkus enjoys composing choral music, mixing her love of music with her love of language. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Rimkus)
a bit dissonant, with layered and sometimes conflicting harmony and textures,” she said. “A lot of what I think about is communication and its failures. Especially in an era where we are bombarded with so much information in so many seemingly instantaneous forms, true communication gets relegated to a back burner.”
Rimkus said her work strikes a balance between the intellectually interesting and the beautiful.
“It’s grounded in tonal harmony, but I do it in my own way,” she said.
Finding various different texts to work with also adds variety to Rimkus’ work.
“I write a lot of sacred music,” she said. “Regardless of one’s religious persuasion, there are universal themes in those texts.”
In addition, she seeks out texts from other sources. One example is the poetry of Dana Gioia.
“I knew him from USC; he was chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts for eight years, and former poet laureate of California. He writes using both traditional rhyme schemes and contemporary terminology.”
An upcoming CD recorded by the Grammy-nominated Westminster Williamson Voices under Dr. James Jordan will include Rimkus’ The Burning Ladder as well as a work by LaVoy, both set to Gioia’s poetry.
For another commission, this one awarded by The Esoterics for their Polyphonos competition, Rimkus interviewed two survivors of the United States’ internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, Lilly Kitamoto Kodama (interned at age 7) and Kay Sakai Nakao (interned at age 20). Rimkus then “took their words and wove them into a secular requiem,” Uprooted.
Yet another commission, this one by the Harmonium Choral Society of New Jersey, tasked her to write a Christmas work based on the biblical text of John 1:1. Rimkus used that text but wove together the words as rendered in the five most commonly spoken languages in the
world — Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic and Hindi, combining Rimkus’ love of music with her love of language. “A mass setting I wrote was performed in Aberdeen; it mingled two languages, with Latin sung by the choir and Scottish Gaelic sung by a quartet, with the different textures interweaving,” she said.
And before the pandemic, the Portara Ensemble in Nashville commissioned a piece for a planned concert on the theme of space exploration; Rimkus took her inspiration from the Golden Record contained in the Voyager probe, which was created by NASA to include multiple languages and music, including the first movement of Bach’s second Brandenburg concerto. Rimkus is writing a choral reflection on that music, with texts taken from the Golden Record’s various readings and languages.
Other work focuses on folk traditions in many languages.
“I’d love to delve into Finnish,” Rimkus said.
How do choirs handle Rimkus’ music? Some of them are professionals; others are not.
“There are ways to write complex music for any level of singing group,” Rimkus said. “You just have to be smart about it, be clear in your explanations, and give the choir confidence that they can do it.”
For example, for a work premiered online in 2020 by an all-volunteer choir in San Diego, Rimkus used the organ and brass for more challenging harmonies and “made sure the singers’ lines all supported each other.”
“You want to give the singers something to sink their teeth into, but at the appropriate level of challenge,” she said.
How can a young person hope to make a living as a freelance composer? Rimkus said, “A few years ago I would never have thought it possible.” But “things have a snowball effect. You write music and it’s performed and, hopefully, recorded. People listen and some of them want to perform it themselves or commission new pieces.”
For example, she wrote a piece for cello and vibraphone for the Red Note Ensemble that was performed at a festival of new music in Aberdeen.
“Students from the Royal Conservatoire attended, and one came up to me afterwards and asked if I was Lithuanian. I explained that I’m American but my family name comes from Lithuania,” Rimkus said. “It turned out that she was pulling together a concert by alumni of her singing school in Lithuania, and they commissioned a work. This was back in 2015, but that work has been performed many times, most recently in Rochester, New York. Lee Ryder [founder of several New York choral groups] came across it, liked it, and since then has commissioned me to write four more works. And so things go.”
Besides composing music herself, Rimkus teaches at Michigan Tech as an instructor in composition and theory. She also teaches private students.
“I love teaching as much as composing, and I like the structure of academic life as well as being part of an academic community and influencing younger musicians,” she said.
While here, she has drawn inspiration
from the Upper Peninsula’s extraordinary natural beauty and the vibrant community she found in Marquette.
Critics have called her work “challenging yet attractive,” “always powerful and well-judged,” and with language that includes not only “denser textures that suggest a holy clamor” but also “uncluttered lyrical poignancy.”
For those wanting the opportunity to hear it for themselves, CDs which include her music include several recent releases by the Cambridge Chorale, SACRA/ PROFANA, and the Gesualdo Six, along with excerpts featured on Rimkus’ own website, sarahrimkus.com.
Editor’s Note: For Katherine Larson, good things come in threes: three daughters, three grandchildren, and three careers. Lawyering and teaching were fun, but food writing is the most fun of all. She loves food justice, food history, and all things delicious.
