Anna Weesner (born 1965)
Anna Weesner was born in Iowa City and grew up in New Hampshire. She studied flute and composition as an undergraduate at Yale and received a Doctor of Musical Arts from Cornell. She currently lives in Philadelphia where she is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Only a few of Anna Weesner’s works are available in performance on YouTube, and some of those (for example, We Shall Overcome and Where Songs Go at Night) aren’t listed among her works on her website.
This composition, Sudden, Unbidden is listed as a string quartet on her website with a composition date of 1998. I don’t know when this version for violin and cello came about, but I like the mix of the stark driving rhythms and more ethereal and lyrical passages. (Is that the contrast between “sudden” and “unbidden” in the title?)
This video of Where Songs Go at Night indicates that it was composed in 2021. The instrumentation is flute, oboe, clarinet, tenor sax, horn and bassoon:
The description on the website includes this note by the composer:
I am fascinated by the familiarity of song structure and by the presence of songs in our lives. Where Songs Go at Night makes use of elements of songs, including a repeating harmonic progression, a repeating bass line, some folk-like melodies, though it imagines these elements in a context that is not as focused or clear as a single song. It’s something more like a community of song parts, or a set of backstage locations where those elements gather when they’re not busy doing their jobs in their respective songs. Some elements are found wandering, some are singing, some are lost, and some found. They mingle, chat, argue, and finally come together.