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Anna Weesner: Thomson Award

caption: Anna WeesnerComposer Anna Weesner, the Dr. Robert Weiss Professor of Music at Penn, has won the Virgil Thomson Award in Vocal Music. The award, endowed by the Virgil Thomson Foundation and administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recognizes an American composer of vocal works. Candidates were nominated by the Academy’s members, and the winner was chosen by a special jury of composers. The award will be given at the annual Ceremonial in mid-May.

Ms. Weesner is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2008 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2003 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Recent performances of note include the Daedalus Quartet’s performance of The Space Between at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 2017 and the Riverside Symphony’s performance of Still Things Move in Alice Tully Hall in 2016. Cygnus Ensemble will be playing My Mother in Love for voice and six instruments at Symphony Space on April 30, 2018, with soprano Tony Arnold.

Her music has been recorded on CRI and Albany Records. She has been commissioned by Open End, violist Melia Watras, Network for New Music, the MATA festival, the Cypress Quartet, Dawn Upshaw, Sequitur and Orchestra 2001, among others.

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