Michigan-born American composer Elena Ruehr takes eclecticism to new lengths: her press materials accurately promise influences from Pérotin, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorák, Schoenberg, and jazz, and there are sounds of Indonesian gamelan music, Indian classical traditions, and various African and Latin American folk musics on top of that. It's hard to know what to make of the assertion that "Ruehr is a devotee of 12-tone techniques and minimalist methods; they go hand in hand." That's certainly not a position to which ...
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Michigan-born American composer Elena Ruehr takes eclecticism to new lengths: her press materials accurately promise influences from Pérotin, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorák, Schoenberg, and jazz, and there are sounds of Indonesian gamelan music, Indian classical traditions, and various African and Latin American folk musics on top of that. It's hard to know what to make of the assertion that "Ruehr is a devotee of 12-tone techniques and minimalist methods; they go hand in hand." That's certainly not a position to which either the minimalists or the 12-tone composers would assent (one thinks of the self-description of Milton Babbitt, one of Ruehr's teachers, as a "maximalist"). Yet Ruehr generally avoids blank pastiche. Each work has a consistent stylistic universe, and the string quartet form, especially, anchors the diversity in classical forms. The appeal of these works, in fact, often lies in the tension between the string quartet medium and the variety of musical references. Some of these...
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