Elena Ruehr

Elena Ruehr
composer

Elena Ruehr's works are commissioned and performed internationally by musicians such as Cypress, the Borromeo and Shanghai String Quartets, Naumburg winning baritone Stephen Salters, and orchestras including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and The Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble. Her dance opera Toussaint Before the Spirits opened to great critical acclaim as part of Boston's Opera Unlimited Festival in June 2003.

Dr. Ruehr studied at both the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School of Music. While a student, she won the ASCAP, New York Youth Symphony and Lincoln Center New Music Festival composition competitions, and her early orchestral works also received prizes from the Cincinnati Symphony, the Omaha Symphony and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. At the age of 28 she earned a position on the music faculty at MIT and she has taught there ever since. In 1995 she received MIT's Baker Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Her work Shimmer, for string orchestra, is available from Albany Records on their Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble CD.

Performances

Club Concert #3
Moonshine Room at Club Café | May 19, 2009
Concert Details
Club Concert #3
Moonshine Room at Club Café | March 15, 2005
Concert Details
Minimalism
Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory | February 18, 2005
Concert Details
Next
Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory | May 21, 2004
Concert Details
What's New?
Jordan Hall at New England Conservatory | March 7, 2003
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News and Press

[Press Release] 1996-2006: A decade of orchestral milestones
In 1996, Gil Rose set out to restore a widening disconnect between contemporary audiences and contemporary music—a relatively recent trend in the rich history of orchestras. The result was the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and a new orchestral model. Ten years later, BMOP remains dedicated to its mission and is considered by many to be the leading orchestra for commissioning, performing, and recording modern orchestral music. April 1996 Premiere Performance of BMOP
Full release
[Concert Review] Varied minimalism works are played to maximum effect
“The greatest virtue of Friday’s “Minimalism” concert by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project was to raise the question of whether the minimalism tag has outlived its relevance. Each of the four works the orchestra presented - three by minimalism’s leading lights and one by BMOP’s composer-in-residence, Elena Ruehr - adopted some conventions of the minimalist aesthetic, but each took them in such different directions that it’s doubtful the label is now anything more than a convenient, generic shorthand. . .
The Boston Globe Full review
[Concert Review] BMOP soars through graceful season finale
“A dazzling world premiere by Evan Ziporyn and the appearance of not one but two celebrated guest soloists distinguished the final concert of this year’s Boston Modern Orchestra Project season at Jordan Hall on Friday. Renowned “new music” pianist Ursula Oppens applied her unfailingly insightful curiosity and sublime graciousness of touch to Augusta Read Thomas’s 2000 intermittently appealing Aurora. And master clarinetist Richard Stoltzman’s playing impressed as usual in Stephen Hartke’s 2001 Clarinet Concerto....
The Boston Globe Full review

 

BMOP gave each piece the benefit of brilliant and dedicated playing, especially in the strings and percussion, which bore the lion's share of the work.

— The Boston Globe Full review