Anna Weesner

Winner of a 2023 Fromm Music Foundation Commission, Anna Weesner lives and works in Philadelphia. Her recent output includes a set of songs called My Mother in Love for which she wrote music and text, forthcoming in a recorded studio version and originally commissioned by Cygnus Ensemble. Recent chamber music includes The Eight Lost Songs of Orlando Underground for clarinet quintet, commissioned and premiered by the Lark Quartet with Romie de Guise-Langlois, and Song-Shaped Absence in a Soundtracked World, commissioned by Mimi Stillman and Dolce Suono Ensemble. Winner of a 2019 Independence Foundation Grant, the 2018 Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music as well as an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is also the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2003 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She has been in residence at MacDowell, the Virginia Center, Weekend of Chamber Music, Songfest, Seal Bay Festival, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and Civitella Ranieri. Her music has been performed widely, including by Tony Arnold, James Austin Smith, the Daedalus Quartet, the Lark Quartet, the Cypress Quartet, the Cassatt Quartet, Prism Saxophone Quartet, Dolce Suono Ensemble, Peggy Pearson and Winsor Music, Counter)Induction, Dawn Upshaw and Richard Goode, Eighth Blackbird, Network for New Music, Orchestra 2001, the American Composers Orchestra and the Riverside Symphony, and has been featured at Tanglewood, the Look and Listen Festival, and the Portland Chamber Music Festival, among others. Playing the flute in the New Hampshire Youth Orchestra as a teenager was for Anna a formative experience, nourishing a love of music that started at the age of five with Suzuki method violin lessons. Composition was a natural discovery in high school and college for the daughter of a fiction writer and a music teacher. Anna maintains a lifelong relationship with the radio and the presets in her car are heavy on pop. She studied at Yale (B.A.) and Cornell (D.M.A.) and is Robert Weiss Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.