Elena Ruehr

In this episode, I chat with Dr. Elena Ruehr. Dr. Ruehr is a composer, Guggenheim Fellow, and award-winning faculty member at MIT, where she has taught since 1992. A graduate of the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School, her music (described by The New York Times as "sumptuously scored and full of soaring melodies" and by Gramophone as "unspeakably gorgeous") spans opera, orchestra, chamber music, and choral works. She has written five operas and five cantatas, with major recordings on BMOP Sound, Avie, and Albany, and her works have been commissioned and performed by ensembles including the Borromeo, Cypress, and Shanghai String Quartets. Currently composer-in-residence with the Lincoln Symphony, Dr. Ruehr brings to all her work a guiding artistic principle: "the idea is that the surface be simple, the structure complex."