Interview with Anne Akiko Meyers: A Year After the Fires

December 22, 2025, 2:22 PM · The holiday season is in full swing with fairy lights and festive decorations, music, parties and special food...But where I live, a painful anniversary looms: January 7th - the day of the Los Angeles fires in 2025.

The 2025 fires drove some 180,000 people from their homes - many to never return. This devastating event happened so soon after the holidays that many people still had decorations up, or were just putting them away. The fires destroyed a staggering swath of the Los Angeles communities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, burning a total of 16,000+ homes, businesses, and other buildings.

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers was among the tens of thousands of people who never came home after those fires.

Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. Photo by Dina Douglass.

"We loaded up the car that night, and we never returned," Anne told me in an interview last month. "I'm a very lucky person, because the house didn't burn to the ground, as it did for most of my friends here." She was able to recover scores and other items from the burnt house, but she feels deeply for friends who lost everything - family heirlooms, photographs, instruments, and music libraries - "all their life's work."

Still, during a banner year for Anne - she has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, released three recordings and garnered a Grammy nomination - she and her family simultaneously have been in constant transition, living in a series of hotels and rental homes. Her old neighborhood is gone; her children's former schools burned. A whole way of life evaporated overnight. She and her family probably never will return to living in the place they once called home. The house next to theirs "burned to the studs," and theirs was badly damaged.

"When I walk through that house, it's like a sunken ship. It feels like the Titanic," she said. "It's just almost too sad for me to be there."

With these experiences and feelings still fresh for herself and the community around her, Anne has thrown herself completely into marking the anniversary of the fires. On the January 7 anniversary, she will give two live performances, the second which will include a piece of music that was born of that grief: "The Pacific Has No Memory," by Eric Whitacre. On the same day she also will release a recording of the work, performed with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at its premiere last spring at Carnegie Hall.

Her live performances will take place at the recently re-opened St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in the Palisades - the first concerts at that church since the fire. "St. Matt's" is where one of Anne's daughters used to attend school; its campus was scorched by the fire, with 13 of its 21 buildings burnt to the ground. It is a place full of memories - back in 2021, when her daughter was nine, they performed "Ave Maria" together at that church. (Here is their performance from then. It was poignant enough following the pandemic - watching it now made me cry all over again.)

"When I heard that the church was available, and that these would be the first concerts back in in the church, I just was so struck by wanting to embrace the community," Anne told me. "I feel like I need a hug - and I also want to give hugs."

Eric Whitacre already was writing a piece for Anne, before the fires. She had commissioned a piece from him after falling in love with his vocal piece Seal Lullaby, performed by VOCES8. "During the pandemic, I would listen to a YouTube video of their performance and cry repeatedly, because it's just so beautiful - so ethereal and otherworldly," she said. "I thought, how would he write for violin?"

His piece for Anne was initially entitled "Murmur" - inspired by bird formations of starlings, called "murmurations." But that changed when Whitacre had his own experience of the fires.

Whitacre had lived in Los Angeles for 25 years and moved to Belgium in 2024. He had flown to Los Angeles for a visit on January 8th, 2025. As he describes it in his program notes: "The sky over the Palisades was already smudged black, homes and histories evaporating into the quiet air."

Anne told me that Whitacre "had never seen such devastation and such angst and pain and suffering from so many of his friends who had lost everything. It made him pivot with his entire work and composition." The new music flowed from his pen, and the result was "The Pacific Has No Memory."

The name is based on a character from The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne, who dreams of going to the Pacific Ocean, to a Mexican town called Zihuatanejo, for a fresh start.

"The ocean - how it ebbs and flows - reminds him that there is hope, that there can be a change for a new future," Anne said. "I thought that was unbelievably poignant. The piece is so poetic, and it embodies so much emotion. It's very vocal. It's so deeply emotional to perform it, to feel the reverberations through your heart."

BELOW: "The Pacific Has No Memory" - an excerpt from the premiere performance by violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, last spring at Carnegie Hall.

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Concerts of Remembrance, Healing and Renewal: Anne will give two live performances on January 7: at 1 p.m. with works by Bach, Morten Lauridsen and Whitacre's "Seal Lullaby" with Grant Gershon and members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale; and at 7 p.m. she will perform "The Pacific Has No Memory" and other works with Lucinda Carver at The Pacific Strings, both on January 7 at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, 1031 Bienveneda Ave., Pacific Palisades, Calif. Click here for more information.
Recording Release: On January 7 Anne will release her recording of "The Pacific Has No Memory," with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, featuring its world premiere performance last spring at Carnegie Hall. Click here for more information.

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Interview with Anne Akiko Meyers: A Year After the Fires

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