Elena Ruehr, composer

Elena's Ruehr's music has been called "Stunning...beautifully lighted by Ruehr's canny instinct for knowing when and how to vary key, timbre, and harmony" (Richard Buell, The Boston Globe).

In addition to being composer in residence with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project for many years, Dr. Ruehr's orchestral music has won commissions and awards from the Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble, ASCAP, the Cincinatti Symphony, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the New York Youth Symphony, and the Omaha Symphony. According to the American  Record Guide her string orchestra piece Shimmer "brings joy to the listener" and it has received performances and radio play worldwide.

Dr. Ruehr has written four string quartets for the internationally recognized Shanghai, Borremeo and Cypress Quartets.  Of her first quartet, Josiah Fisk of  the Boston Herald wrote: "there's no mistaking the profusion of ideas, the adroitness of technique and the restlessness of spirit that permeate this music".   Her Third String Quartet was "an astounding success, conveying an emotional directness the audience could easily grasp, yet still holding musical complexities that should make it a performance staple in the quartet repertory" (Keith Powers, Boston Sunday erald).  A commission from the Cypress Quartet led to her Fourth String Quartet, which is influenced by  Mozart's Dissonant Quartet and Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 59 #3. Richard Scheinin of the San Jose Mercury News said Ruehr's Fourth Quartet... "is a direct response to the Mozart and Beethoven quartets and sounds as if it has soaked up essential qualities from both: shifting light-dark moods and textures; great dancing rhythms; and, best of all, aria-like songs."

Her long-time collaborations with baritone Stephen Salters (winner of the Naumberg Competition) and choreographer Nicola Hawkins led to a commission from Opera Boston and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project for a dance opera, Toussaint Before the Spirits, which "had the audience on its feet, cheering, whistling, and applauding.combines a lyrical outpouring energized by motor rhythms that never become mechanical.compelling, emotional, theatrical..takes us back to the beginnings of the art, and to one of the first great operas, Gluck's ''Orfeo''--- Richard Dyer, Boston Globe.

Dr. Ruehr  studied at the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School of Music. While finishing graduate school, Dr. Ruehr accepted a position teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught there ever since, winning the Baker Undergraduate Teaching Award in her first few years at M.I.T. She has also recently joined the faculty at The Boston Conservatory.