Photo by Charles Bandes
Elena Ruehr has been called a “composer to watch” by Opera News, and her music has been described as “stunning...beautifully lighted by [a] canny instinct for knowing when and how to vary key, timbre, and harmony” by The Boston Globe.
Dr. Ruehr grew up in Michigan’s isolated Upper Peninsula, where her musical training began at home with her mother, who sang and played the guitar. Her father, a mathematician, played jazz piano. She began playing piano and composing at age four, and later studied modern dance. Her town of 4,000 was also home to Finnish kantele player and classical composer Melvin Kangas, whom Dr. Ruehr counts as her earliest mentor. She then studied with William Bolcom at the University of Michigan and Vincent Persichetti at The Juilliard School. In addition to her classical studies, she played in the University of Michigan Gamelan and studied West African drumming.
Her most recent work is a cantata based on Louise Gluck’s Averno, commissioned by the Jebediah Foundation and the Grammy award winning Washington Chorus and supported by Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. She has also had commissions, awards and residencies with leading ensembles and presenters across the country including the Shanghai, Borromeo and Cypress Quartets, the Washington Chorus, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Opera Boston, the Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, the Cincinnatti Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the New York Youth Symphony, the Florestan Project, North Carolina Chamber Music Festival, Dinosaur Annex, Centrum Chamber Music Festival, Roanoke Virginia Chamber Music Festival, East Carolina University, and Villa Montalvo.
Recently, she has written two string quartets for the Cypress String Quartet. In 2005, she wrote her String Quartet No. 4 for the ensemble, and The Washington Post called it “music with heart and...a forceful sense of character and expression.” Her second quartet for the group, Bel Canto, is based on Ann Patchett’s novel of the same title and will be premiered in February 2010 in San Francisco. In addition to the Cypress, advocates for her music include the Borromeo String Quartet, the Shanghai String Quartet, and baritone Stephen Salters.
A faculty member at M.I.T. since 1991, Dr. Ruehr has lectured at Princeton University, Boston College, Boston Conservatory, Longy School of Music, Berklee School of Music, Eastman School of Music, and Oberlin Conservatory, and was a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, Yaddo, and the Aspen Center for Compositional Studies.
Dr. Ruehr was composer-in-residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project from 2000-2005, and the orchestra premiered her pieces Shimmer, Sky Above Clouds and Ladder to the Moon, as well as her acclaimed opera Toussaint Before the Spirits in collaboration with Opera Boston. Her orchestral music has also been performed by the Cincinnati Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Available recordings of Dr. Ruehr’s music include Toussaint Before the Spirits (Arsis), Jane Wang considers the Dragonfly (Albany),and Shimmer (Albany).
A natural collaborator across genres, Dr. Ruehr has worked with the Nicola Hawkins Dance Company on critically-acclaimed performances in New York and Boston. She also wrote the film score for the documentary The Manhattan Trade School for Girls, part of the Treasures from the National Film Archives’ Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film. The film was chosen as one of the top six DVDs of the year in 2007 by TIME magazine.
Dr. Ruehr lives in Brookline with her daughter, Sophie, and her husband, Seward Rutkove.