Elena Ruehr

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Elena Ruehr is a composer of opera, orchestral, film, and chamber music. Her many vocal works have been set to poetry by Louise Glück, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Sappho, Mary Ellen Solt, and Elizabeth Spires. Her recent work has focused on continuing historical traditions, sometimes directly influenced by specific works—her fourth string quartet was a response to Mozart’s Dissonant Quartet and Beethoven’s Quartet Op 59 #3—and sometimes by a more general understanding of musical forms and genres and how they are related to specific performance practices.

She will write Cantata Averno for male and female vocal soloists, solo cello, chorus, and orchestra, based on Glück’s most recent book of poetry, Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). The premiere will be conducted by Julian Wachner at McGill University and will feature Naumburg Prize–winning baritone Stephen Salters, for whom Ruehr has written a number of other works. In addition to writing Cantata Averno, she will also record her string quartets with the Cypress Quartet while at the Radcliffe Institute.

Ruehr teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied at the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School of Music. She has received commissions from the Cypress, Borromeo, and Shanghai string quartets, the Metamorphosen Chamber Ensemble, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, where she has been composer in residence. Her string orchestra work Shimmer is available on Albany Records, and her opera Toussaint Before the Spirits is available on Arsis records.