The musical trio Professor Girlfriend, which includes Anna Weesner, Dr. Robert Weiss Professor of Music in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences, bends genre and challenges boundaries with a new album, ‘My Mother In Love: The Summer Sessions.’
2 min. read
A boy reads a book about war while his mother sits silently in the kitchen, placing her head on the table. This scene opens “My Mother in Love: The Summer Sessions,” the new album from Professor Girlfriend, a musical trio consisting of Anna Weesner, Dr. Robert Weiss Professor of Music in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, singer Charlotte Mundy, and engineer-producer Charles Mueller.
Professor Girlfriend’s debut album marks a shift from Anna Weesner’s prior work, situating her as part of a collaborative trio rather than as a composer.
(Image: Courtesy of Anna Weesner)
The album’s premise is straightforward—brief snippets of a child’s observations of his mother, who is falling apart, alternating with observations of the mother herself—yet the music carrying the lyrics is anything but, oscillating between quiet and bouncy as its rhythms become more active and driving. “The idea that this is genre-defying has been one of the most fun aspects of it for me,” says Weesner, who notes that “My Mother In Love” represents a genre shift for her, one that pushes her music into a new space.
As a classical composer, Weesner isn’t new to making recordings. Her previous work, such as “Small and Mighty Forces,” released in 2014, has focused on acoustic chamber music, with the recording as documentation of live performance. Professor Girlfriend’s debut marks a different approach, both given its highly collaborative nature and the music at its core. Weesner says her husband has fondly called the album “a love letter to pop music”—one that isn’t quite pop itself but still pulses with appreciation for the genre. That energy is, in no small part, due to the benefits of collaboration, she adds, praising Mundy and Mueller as “incredibly inspiring musicians” who have skillsets in both classical and pop music.
“My previous work has been situated in the world of contemporary art music,” Weesner says about the new album. “At the same time, 10 of the 14 songs on this album are new versions of songs I have already, in fact, recorded acoustically in a concert hall. It’s fair to say that this new direction has been hiding in plain sight for a long time.”
The band name comes from a term of endearment from her husband. “One day it occurred to me that I liked it as a band name,” Weesner says.
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