Anna Heflin Interview
Anna Heflin is a composer/writer. While her main focus is composing, she launched Which Sinfonia in 2021 “as a place to explore experimentalism in music and writing and a place to foster a community of writers who have an active musical practice. I’ve worked with my co-editor Emery Kerekes and contributor Jennifer Gersten since the launch, and this energy of friendship and collaboration is integral to the site as we’ve expanded to include more contributors.” If you’re into classical music, it’s a must read.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
My educational background is as a violist—I started playing when I was 3 and got my BM from University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and my MM from San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). The blessing about both of these schools is that I had room to explore composition and writing simultaneously. At UCSB I took experimental electronic music with Curtis Roads and took graduate level art history seminars, where I wrote papers and did field studies on music in the museum space.
I participated in the first iteration of the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism at SFCM in 2016. To prepare for the Institute, I took semester-long course from Joshua Kosman with two other students on Writing About Music. The Institute and Kosman’s course helped me expand how I thought about music, the experience widened my perspective, and I unexpectedly got incredibly encouraging feedback from a select few of the panelists who privately told me that they saw writing about music as a key part of my future. That was shocking to me as I had never considered the possibility of seeing myself as a journalist/critic.