Anna Weesner

Anna Weesner (born 1965) is an American classical composer. Originally a flute student, educator, and performer, she later shifted towards composing in the 1990s. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, she has released two albums – Small and Mighty Forces and My Mother in Love (2024) – and she is Dr. Robert Weiss Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

Early life and career Anna Weesner was born in 1965 in Iowa City, Iowa. She was later raised in Durham, New Hampshire, where her father worked at the University of New Hampshire at the time. Bernard Holland of The New York Times said that in a 1996 performance in Voices of the Spirit at the 92nd Street Y, she "offer[ed] a spiritual vision that prefers hard truths to warm reassurance." In 2000, Peter Dobrin of The Philadelphia Inquirer said that the instrumental ranges of her piece "Sudden, Unbidden" "mak for an unattractive, expressive skittishness"; the next year, he praised her for "knowing the value of repetition" and being "especially communicative" in the first song of her composition series Early, After, Ever, Now.

Weesner's 2002 piece "Still Things Move", commissioned for the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, was commended by Ellen Pfeifer of The Boston Globe as "a very attractive essay in three interconnected movements", and Allan Kozinn of The New York Times said that it "thrived on the ground between the Wuorinen and the Hovhaness" and "in its best moments it was animated and full of surprising turns." She was a 2003 Pew Fellow in Music, and was the recipient of a 2008 American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Weesner's album Small and Mighty Forces was released from Albany Records in 2014; The same year, her 2006 piece "Mother Tongues" was performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival; Matthew Guerrieri of The Boston Globe said that it "circled its short, often pop-pentatonic motives, judged the arrangement from a distance, went back in and shifted things around." In 2018, she won the Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music. She was a 2020 winner of an Independence Foundation Fellow in Performing Arts. In 2023, she was awarded a Fromm Foundation Commission. In 2024, she released another album, My Mother in Love, from Bridge Records. In 2022, Weesner was appointed Dr. Robert Weiss Professor of Music at Penn.

Discography Title Year Details Ref. Small and Mighty Forces 2014 Released: October 1, 2014 Label: Albany Records My Mother in Love 2024 Released: 2024 Label: Bridge Records Other compositions Title Year Album Ref. "Alter? When the Hills Do" 1996 "Falling In" 2002 Music of Our Time: Volume 5 "Distant Heart" 2009 Innocence Lost: The Berg-Debussy Project "Vamp" 2009 Animal, Vegetable, Mineral "Possible Stories" 2011 Lines "Flexible Parts" 2012 Short Stories "The Eight Lost Songs of Orlando Underground" 2019 Lark Quartet: A Farewell Celebration