Ann Callaway was born in Washington D.C. and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied with Alvin Etler, George Crumb, and Jack Beeson, among others. Her music has been broadcast on both coasts of the U.S., and she is the subject of a documentary produced by Swedish Radio. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an orchestral commission from the National Endowment for the Arts, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Banff.Her music for orchestra includes a concerto for bass clarinet and a tone poem, Amethyst, premiered in 1997 by the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.An excerpt from a new piece, The Work Of Sun, was read by the Berkeley Symphony on its Under Construction series.

At 6:00 on an evening in May several years ago, I happened to be standing on the ramparts of a castle overlooking the Main River and the old town of Wuertzburg. I counted at least 10 church steeples in the town below, and it seemed as if the bells in each of them started ringing on the hour. I had never heard such deep throbbing, booming bells. The evening was beautiful, the air soft, and I felt steeped in the centuries-old atmosphere of the castle. Later, on the flight home, I found myself working on some sort of “musical artifact,” and months later it assumed the shape of a very long chorale tune, or perhaps a pavane, more suited to something I might have written if I had lived in the 1600s. I used both the pavane and an idealization of the deep throbbing church bells of Wuertzburg as material for a theme and variations for clarinet, cello, and piano. There is an old French tune naming various churches (how that got into my Germanic fantasy, I can’t say) that suited my purposes, as well as some more “literal” chiming made by touching the nodes of strings in the contra-octave range of the piano, while the corresponding keys of those strings are struck. It is this effect that both opens and closes the piece.”