ELENA RUEHR, composer
Elena Ruehr is a composer whose music has been called “unspeakably gorgeous” (Gramophone Magazine) and she writes “music with heart and a forceful sense of character and expression” (The Washington Post). Available recordings of Dr. Ruehr’s music include How She Danced: String Quartets of Elena Ruehr (Cypress String Quartet), Toussaint Before the Spirits (Arsis), Jane Wang considers the Dragonfly (Albany), and Shimmer (Albany).
In 2008 she was a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, where she wrote her cantata based on Louise Glück’s Averno. Premiered by the Washington Chorus and the Trinity Church Choir in 2011, Julian Wachner, conducting, Averno will be featured in a CD of her complete choral and orchestral music in 2012. Recent commissions include a cello concerto, Cloud Atlas, written for Jennifer Koetzel and the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, and a new work for TenFourteen and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.
She 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. Three of her six string quartets were commissioned by the Cypress String Quartet, and they have also been performed by the Biava, Borromeo, Lark, Roco and Shanghai String Quartets. Through her long time collaboration with baritone Stephen Salters, she has become known for her vocal writing based on work of living writers including Elizabeth Alexander, Louise Glück, Laura Harrington, Marta Rainer, Madison Smart Bell, and Elizabeth Spires.
Dr. Ruehr studied music composition at the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School and has taught at MIT since 1991. She lives in Boston with her husband and daughter.