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 (2014) 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 e 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 comme