My first encounter with Elena Ruehr’s music was when I reviewed in these pages Avie’s terrific release of her first six string quartets in 2018. I was so impressed by her music that I selected the album as my critic’s choice that year and have returned to it on many occasions since – and not just when reviewing follow-up releases, such as that of her next two quartets, A Thousand Cranes (2019) and the 2020 suite Insect Dances (7/22). Her 10th (Long Pond) and 11th (Long Night) quartets, both written in 2023, are due to be premiered by commissioners QuartetES in Reykjavik in March, with recordings to follow, to include also No 9, Keweenaw (2022).

By her own admission, Ruehr has been fairly prolific – ‘I have written quite a lot’ – since her earliest acknowledged works (which date from the mid-1980s) but is always looking to create more. Her website lists around 120 compositions, excluding a few that exist in alternative versions, such as her compact concertinos Quetzal Garden (2015), for flute, and Shadow Light (2016), for viola, both with string quintet or string orchestral accompaniment, or her officially unnumbered but delightful second piano trio, Blackberries (2007), which has been recorded for Albany in its secondary version for clarinet, cello and piano. There is a fluency to almost everything she has composed, from her pleasing set of Preludes (2002) for piano to her five operas.

Although Ruehr has composed in almost every genre, from solo songs to cantatas and operas, from solo sonatas and chamber works (with no fewer than five piano trios) to orchestral pieces (but no symphonies, yet), it is her series of 11 string quartets that dominates her output. They encapsulate so many features of her complex compositional personality: rhythmic élan (Ruehr has been fascinated by dance since childhood, studied African drumming and was a member of the University of Michigan’s gamelan ensemble); soaringly lyrical lines that carry much of the emotional weight of her music; and the connection of past with present in the fusion and blending of different musics from different periods and places. These influences include, among others, Hildegard, Indonesian dance, Beethoven and jazz, all developed within her own 21st-century idiom, usually emphasising the rhythmic rather than harmonic or melodic elements. In her First String Quartet, Four Pieces (1991), while Pérotin is evoked in the opening movement, ‘Patterns’, and Bach in the ‘Interlude’, by the bracing finale, ‘Estampie’, it is Bartók who hoves into view, snap pizzicatos to the fore; and yet the sound world is wholly Ruehr: it never really sounds like anyone else and the effect is exhilarating.

The mark of a great string quartet writer is the ability to explore the medium in ever diversified ways. This is as true of Ruehr as it is of Bartók, Holmboe, Shostakovich or Robert Simpson (to pluck some names at random) – or especially Haydn, from whom the genre descended. The structure of each of Ruehr’s quartets is unique, often with only the barest nod to conventional form, even when it’s outwardly in the four movements of Classical design, as is the case with Nos 1, 3, 4 and 6. The First and the Third (completed a decade later, in 2001) are suites in layout, which is reflected in their evocative movement titles: No 1’s ‘Let’s Sit beneath the Stars’ and ‘Estampie’; No 3’s ‘Clay Flute’ and ‘How She Danced’ (an exuberant, beguiling scherzo). The Fourth (2005) comprises a Classical-seeming sequence of ‘Introduzione’, ‘Aria’, ‘Minuet’ (albeit of an utterly non-Classical type), and ‘Finale’. Composed at the request of the Cypress Quartet to pair with Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet and Beethoven’s Op 59 No 3 ‘Rasumovsky’ Quartet, it opens with Mozart’s initial chord before driving off in its unique direction. As is so often the case in her music, in whatever medium she is writing, the ‘Aria’ is the emotional and stylistic core. No 5, Bel canto (2009), is, against expectation, a sequence of nine kaleidoscopically varied miniature movements, ranging from between 50 seconds and three minutes in length, followed by a 10-minute finale, the beautifully lyrical ‘In the Garden’. (A similar structure also appears in her acclaimed cantata Averno (2008), to words by Louise Glück, in which 10 brief spans find their release in the 14-minute-long setting of ‘Persephone the Wanderer’.) Ruehr’s Eighth Quartet, Insect Dances, is a suite in six movements describing ‘for listeners of all ages’ a lively array of hexapoda.

Different again is Ruehr’s Second Quartet, a 15-minute ‘dramatic work’ entitled Song of the Silkie (2000), which explores – via Laura Harrington’s specially written text – the old Orkney legend of a man enchanted by a changeling seal that becomes a woman. It is cast in one continuous span, as is No 7, A Thousand Cranes (2019), though the later work is rather a series of miniatures running continuously. Inspired by recollections of children displaced by war, the idiom at times seems fleetingly reminiscent of Tippett.

There is a tangible community of spirit in all of Ruehr’s quartets, too, even in the case of the more notionally abstract ones like the Sixth (2012), which to my ears is the most compelling and integrated. Yet this is true of all areas of Ruehr’s composition, not least in the inspiration she draws from the natural world, whether the mythical silkie (or selkie) or the creatures that inhabit her early Emily Dickinson triptych Cricket, Spider, Bee (1999) and the delightful Jane Wang Considers the Dragonfly (2007), for flute and digital delay. Basically, her output is unified by her desire to communicate effectively without compromise. As she herself has noted of her works, ‘The idea is that the surface be simple, the structure complex.’

Ruehr’s relatively modest corpus of works for larger instrumental forces divides between concertos, often of relatively brief duration, and various ensemble works plus a few pieces for full orchestra. All share a basis in the evocation of a specific sensation or extramusical facet. Vocalissimus (1991), her doctoral submission, came first, a bright and brief chamber-orchestral fantasy. This was trumped by her first orchestral commission, from Scott Yoo and the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra; the result was Shimmer (1995) for strings, a brilliant tonal study taking its cue from Vivaldi (though the opening and closing section have a rather Sibelian pulse to them) to build a compelling and attractive orchestral opener. By this time Ruehr had already written Sky above Clouds (1993), based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting, and, in instalments, each a decade after the previous one, she added two further movements – the exuberantly clangorous finale ‘Ladder to the Moon’ (2003) and the opening ‘Summer Days’ (2013) – to form a half-hour-long suite, O’Keeffe Images, one of her most appealing and effective works. During this period she wrote Cloud Atlas (2011), a compact cello concerto based on David Mitchell’s cunningly contrived novel, its six episodes echoing the book’s varying locations and the soloist representing the divine Sonmi-451. It is dedicated to one of Ruehr’s closest musical collaborators, Cypress Quartet cellist Jennifer Kloetzel, for whom she has written several other solo pieces, including a sonata (2015) and a second (equally concise) cello concerto (2021). Ruehr’s delight in fusing disparate styles into convincing wholes can also be heard in her First Piano Concerto (2017), composed for Heng-Jin Park and available on YouTube.

Of her five operas, only the first has been recorded. Scored for chamber forces and in a single, 50-minute act, Toussaint before the Spirits (2003) centres on the great Caribbean revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture during his later captivity as he reconciles himself to fate. It was premiered at Boston’s Opera Unlimited Festival in 2003 with baritone Stephen Salters – a consistent champion of Ruehr’s vocal music (including the recording of her Second Quartet, Song of the Silkie) – in the title-role and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, whose first composer-in-residence was Ruehr (2000-05). Performances of her operas, including her second, Cassandra in the Temples (2014) and, most recently, the comic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2023, about the Victorian computer pioneers), have largely been confined to Boston, with several premiered on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Ruehr is a music faculty lecturer. Nonetheless, they prove Ruehr’s dramatic sense as well as affirming her skill at word-setting, evident in her cantatas, and more recently in her luminous Requiem (2020). Written in memory of her mother, RuthAnn, who died in 2020, as well as the victims of the global pandemic, Ruehr’s Requiem is an intriguing take on the idea of ‘requiem’ – part celebration, part memorial, a work full of the light that infuses so much of her output.

This article originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today