Opening Up with Anna Weesner

Anna Weesner is the Dr. Robert Weiss Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music. Winner of the 2018 Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music as well as a 2008 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2019 Independence Foundation Grant, she is also the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2002 Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe (declined), and a 2003 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Her music has been performed by numerous groups including 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, Cygnus Ensemble, Tony Arnold, Dawn Upshaw and Richard Goode, Eighth Blackbird, Network for New Music, Orchestra 2001, the American Composers Orchestra, the Riverside Symphony, the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, among many others.

Who are you beyond your CV?

Well, I’ve always been a reader, especially of fiction, and I’ve always loved pop music, and neither of those areas lives on my CV. Songwriting has been at the center of my composing work recently, though, so in a way my love of words and music is increasingly finding its way on to my CV. When I went to college and grad school, and frankly, when I started teaching as a composer in the Music Department at Penn in 1997, the study of music was still very much centered in Western art music. For me, playing the flute in youth orchestra and in college was formative. I do love Western art music. Things have changed, though, with the study of music really opening up stylistically, and I guess that might account for a more porous boundary around what’s on my CV. The songwriting I’ve been doing lately involves my own lyrics, and I do think of them as lyrics. In classical music, in art song, we tend to talk about the setting of poetry, but in popular music we think about lyrics. My songs aren’t necessarily pop songs, but my approach right now is certainly about opening up those boundaries.

I believe you’ve been at Penn for a bit—can you say a bit about that?

I’ve been here for 29 years. It’s been amazing to get to have a job where doing my own work is part of the deal. I can’t overemphasize that. So, first… that’s been incredible.

As for the Music Department, I’d say that things have changed quite a bit over the years. The curriculum has changed, and the makeup of the department has changed a lot in my time. When I was in grad school, there was one other female composer in my cohort. I’d always been in these classes with all guys. When I started teaching at Penn, there was one other female faculty member out of 13. So in terms of gender, things have definitely shifted. In terms of musical style, I feel like things have also shifted. I’ve taught intro- and upper-level music theory classes, 20th century music classes, and composition. 25-30 years ago, the students who came to those classes tended to have some classical background, so there was some shared repertoire. I do think the study of music feels more accessible now than it used to, and this is undeniably a good thing. It’s also the case that during that time, technology has changed completely: listening to music is such a niche thing now. When I grew up, there was Top 40 Radio, and almost everybody knew a certain number of pop songs. Now, everyone listens to their own little category of music. So—in pop music as well as in classical—you don’t have the same sense of common rep.

I love teaching songwriting, I think it’s incredibly fun. It took me a long time to feel able to do it at all. I do believe that anybody can write a song. At the same time, I also love and value technique. Expertise. And one of the hardest things right now is figuring out how to balance those two impulses in art, in music, in songwriting. There’s this idea that you just can do it, or you can’t do it. And that you’re not supposed to have to work hard. Technique takes years: there’s what George Saunders in writing describes as titration—a long process of revision, perfecting your work. Going back over and over and over again and finding new things and getting closer is a wonderful part of expertise, I think. I want to figure out how to marry this new sense of openness to different styles and backgrounds with a respect and love for technique.

How do you see your own arts pathways continuing to grow and expand?

It’s interesting how school leads you in certain directions—and how what you study in school and the music you encounter outside of school can feel in some ways separated. For me, playing and writing music was initially connected to school, and it was a way for me to pursue a career. That study was stylistically oriented to classical music, and that love continues. We kind of study everything now, and so that changes the sense of that split, right? It’s often the case that my students will have played an instrument or been in a band, or they just love music, or maybe they were in a singing group. They come to music in one of these ways and then discover classical music later. For me, that trajectory was reversed. Classical music came first, even though I grew up listening to pop music—it’s always lived in my ear—but the two weren’t necessarily connected. Lately they feel connected, and that’s very exciting.

I actually have a piece of chamber music where the conceit of the piece is that there’s this fictional character who is the purported composer: it’s called The Eight Lost Songs of Orlando Underground. I invented this guy: a rock musician, a guitarist who secretly yearns to write concert music, to play with the materials of abstract 20th century music. And I wrote the piece as if I was him. What I liked about doing this was that it flipped the direction of yearning. Instead of starting from the idea that classical is legit and you work hard at it but you wonder What it would be like to be a pop musician? I asked What if there were someone who yearned in the other direction? I loved the idea of celebrating both sides of that longing.

Tell me about your current work. What are you excited to talk about?

I am excited about this album that just came out in August. It started as an accident of the pandemic. In March of 2020, I was supposed to go to Brooklyn and meet with a singer. And then that meeting got canceled because of… everything. And so we started talking on the phone a little bit. Then I began to write some songs at home. I wrote one song that was a graduation present for my son who was a senior in high school at that time. I assumed it would never leave the walls of my living room. That time was sad in a way that was hard to parse—because there were so many more awful things happening everywhere, and yet the smaller sadness was very real, too. So I wrote this song, and I asked the singer, Charlotte Mundy, if she would record it at home. I thought I could add a piano part myself. But she said her housemate, Charles Mueller, was an engineer, and he was there with his studio in the house—maybe he could work on an arrangement. So he started sending me guitar ideas. None of it would have happened if we hadn’t been forced to work that way. After that, we started to make more songs in the studio. It was great fun.

I’d originally composed a set of ten songs called My Mother in Love for a chamber group called Cygnus Ensemble. I was happy with that project, and I thought it would be fun to make studio versions of the songs with Charlotte. The trained voice can be an astoundingly beautiful thing, but I was interested in what it might be like to work with a more natural sound, a sort of pop sound. So that was the beginning. Little by little, we made new versions of those ten songs. For this album, we called the work  My Mother in Love, The Summer Sessions because it’s a very different vibe than the original. The album includes four other songs, in addition. Two of them I wrote specifically for the studio, and I’d never done that before—worked in the studio, collaboratively. But it became very natural to try new things, to kind of let the pop vibe be present, and to work collaboratively. I’ve got plans for a second album—I’m hoping to get it going over the summer.

Is there a working title for that?

There is. Hester Prynne Was Gorgeous.

Love these titles.

Thank you. The next step is to go meet with Charles. The three of us, Charles and Charlotte and myself, we use the name, Professor Girlfriend, as the band/project name. The name is actually something my husband used to call me. Anyway, I have some more composing to do for the next album, but I do have a bunch of songs that are more or less scored. I’ve learned from the process how much I need to write down. It’s a little less than in the classical world, but having experimented with lead sheet notation and more bare-bones, typical pop music type stuff—I’ve realized that that’s not quite enough either. So I’ll bring my music to Charles, and we’ll sit down and make a game plan for putting them together. The arrangements will involve other instruments, and musicians beyond the three of us, for sure, but hopefully not as many as the first album. We’ll probably need four string players and three wind players, and then Charles who plays guitar and bass. We have a drummer we work with—and then Charlotte, the singer, will come in. She’s magical. She’ll come in and do her thing. We’ll do some recording in the studio, and then—well, we’ll go from there.

The New York Times called the most recent work “a singular creation”—can you speak to that?

Oh, that was awfully nice. When I was making this most recent album, it was hard for me to even know what it was. And frankly it was nice to not worry about what it was. One night, though, I asked my husband what he thought it sounded like, and he said, “It’s not pop music, it’s a love letter to pop music.” And I think that’s actually kind of on the money. I found with this album that people who didn’t usually respond to my music had things to say about it. So, different people, different responses. It has lyrics, it felt relatable. And that was very fun for me, because it’s still my real work—it just lands in a slightly different place. By the same token, I’ve had some classical composer friends who I think are kind of skeptical about it. And in some ways, that’s also good. It’s different and new, and I’m glad for that. Anyway, I love that someone described it as a “singular creation.”

Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.