Born and raised in New Hampshire, Anna Weesner is the daughter of a fiction writer and a music teacher. My Mother in Love, for which she wrote music and text, was commissioned by Cygnus Ensemble. She is winner of a 2019 Independence Foundation Grant, the 2018 Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music, an Academy Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2003 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

My Mother in Love (2016) occupies a hybrid genre between opera and pop music, conceived in 10 scenes that describe a family’s dissolution through the alternate perspectives of mother and son. The father’s family abandonment initiates a motif of “fracture” that permeates the musical texture. By the end, mother and son console each other, while the sister has gone her own way. The music is essentially tonal, with influnces from Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber. Weesner wrote the libretto, scored for soprano, string quartet, flute, oboe, violin, cello, and two guitars.

Love Story in Six Parts (2017; rev. 2023), in the form of a musical diary, portrays an intimate relationship from early infatuation, rupture, to renewed connection. The music evolves in small gestures of two and three notes, with emphases on instrumental nuances, timbres, and shifts of register. The intent is to sing “of our desire, our desperate need to see the person we believe ourselves to be when reflected in the eyes of another,”

Eight Last Songs of Orlando Underground (2019) was commissioned and premiered by the Lark String Quartet with Romie de guise-Langois. Fictional character, Orlando Underground, is a blues guitarist with classical aspirations. A posthumous manuscript of a clarinet quintet in the form of eight instrumental songs captures his passions, obsessions, and regrets. The musical texture embraces rock and classical techniques, including passacaglia and 12-tone progressions. The influences include Keith Jarrett and Steve Reich.