Composer Elena Ruehr: “I’m an optimist—it’s the only way I can manage it.”
Composers have more hope than others these days.
Stereotypically, composers are the neediest musicians. Little wonder. Writing music takes years, and other musicians get to perform it. Those musicians get the applause. The composer gets a quick bow at the end of the premiere—seconds of recognition—and it’s back to the desk. To work on another long-term project.
So forced isolation may seem a lot like business-as-usual for some composers.
“I miss it all for sure,” Elena Ruehr says about concerts. “Dressing up. The performances. Rehearsals are fun. Sussing out what performers can play, and want to play.”
Concerts have stopped, but composing has not.
“I’ve been writing a lot of music, and not just since this all started,” she says. “I was brimming with ideas before, but I didn’t know how to put them down as well. Now I do.”
The composer, longtime professor at MIT, splits her time between Brookline and Wellfleet. Prolific and well-received, her larger works include the 2003 opera “Toussaint Before the Spirits,” and the orchestral suite “O’Keeffe Images,” both of which grew from her residency with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. In addition, there are seven string quartets; concertos for violin, viola, piano and cello; and dozens of other settings, both grand and modest.
She has just finished the score for another opera, “Cosmic Cowboy,” this year’s White Snake Productions commission, which is still scheduled for September in Boston.
Ruehr brims with ideas, both awake and dreaming it seems. Social media is full of people recounting their extraordinarily vivid isolation dreams these days. Count Ruehr among them.
She actually dreamt of a project that is coming to fruition—a collaboration with American pianist Lara Downes.
“I had a dream that she was playing a piano concerto of mine,” Ruehr says. “It even had a name—“Quiet Streets.” So I told her and she said, ‘I’m making a lullaby CD now. Why not write a lullaby called “Quiet Streets” for that, and someday it can be a concerto.’
“So I’m writing a lullaby, but my idea is bigger. I’m hot on it now: Strings, sax, percussion—maybe just timpani.
“Downs is a beautiful pianist, great voice and timing,” Ruehr says, “and she has this aesthetic that branches into jazz and popular styles. I like that, and I’m like that too.”
The score for White Snake’s “Cosmic Cowboy” just got delivered—a three-year composing project. But writing for that was interspersed with many other shorter compositions, and so it’s no surprise Ruehr still has half-a-dozen ideas on her to-do list.
Ruehr stays in touch with members of the disbanded Cypress Quartet, who regularly performed and recorded her quartets. The group’s cellist Jennifer Kloetzel is commissioning pieces to match with the six Bach suites—“I’m paired with the first suite,” Ruehr says.
Violinist Cecily Ward, in London, “just bought a digital delay, and wants something for that.” Ruehr’s also working on a new theater piece for Boston’s Guerilla Opera, based on a graphic novel by Sydney Padua.
“It doesn’t feel different in terms of daily work,” she says of her schedule. “I’m a worker bee. Every day, four hours a day, that’s how I run my daily life.
“I’ve had a whole bunch of performances canceled. So has everyone, and I do miss the social aspect,” she says. “Not just my own music, but hearing my colleagues too.
“It will get better. I’m an optimist—it’s the only way I can manage it.”