Marjorie Rusche

Marjorie M. Rusche is an internationally performed award winning composer who combines romantic, modernist, and vernacular influences in her music. Dr. Rusche composes for opera, music theater, orchestra, chorus, dance, soloists, and a variety of vocal and instrumental chamber ensembles.

Her opera Our American Odyssey premiered 10/20&21/2023 in piano-vocal form, produced by the South Bend Lyric Opera.
Awards and commissions include: Border Songs, for soprano, Eb alto saxophone, and piano commissioned by Stacy Maugans, saxophone, funded by a FY2024 Arts Project Support Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, premiered 5/4/2024; The Gamboling Girl, commissioned by the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, premiered 1/9/2022; Dreams and Visions (Searching the Shadows) for oboe, viola, and piano, commissioned by Jennet Ingle, oboe, premiered 1/26/2020 with subsequent performances throughout In and MI; Songs of Love and Death for soprano and piano performed 3/6/2020 on the Fourth Annual International Music by Women Festival, Columbus, MS; song cycle excerpts were premiered 3/7/2014 on a New York City Underworld Productions Opera CrossCURRENT concert.

Rusche was a guest composer 3/2/2013 with Musica Reginae Productions, New York City and was honored as a guest composer at the 13th London New Music for Winds Festival, 11/19/2010, 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.
She has taught music composition, orchestration, opera history, music theory and piano at Indiana University South Bend, the University of Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College, Southwestern Michigan University, and Columbia College Chicago. She taught music in Kenya while serving in the U.S. Peace Corps. She earned her D.M. in Music Composition from Indiana University Bloomington, and her M.A. in Music Composition & Theory from the University of Minnesota Minneapolis, where she was a charter member of the American Composers Forum (aka Minnesota Composers Forum).

www.marjorierusche.com
http://marjoriemrusche.bandcamp.com
http://marjorieruscheouramericanodysseyopera.com