Interview with Anne Akiko Meyers: 'Blue Electra' Violin Concerto

April 11, 2025, 2:35 PM · The pioneering 20th century pilot Amelia Earhart caught the world by storm with her bold spirit, adventurous accomplishments and tragic disappearance at age 39, during her 1937 attempt to fly around the world.

It's an exhilarating life's story - and it's also the inspiration for a violin concerto called Blue Electra written for violinist Anne Akiko Meyers in 2022 by Grammy-award-winning composer Michael Daugherty.

"I definitely feel Amelia Earhart's soul, and I feel her power when I perform 'Blue Electra,'" Anne told me in an interview several weeks ago.

Pilot Amelia Earhart with her Electra plane, left, and violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, right.

A new recording of the work comes out today on an album called "Blue Electra," featuring Anne performing with the Albany Symphony and conductor David Alan Miller. (Find it here.)

The project took root around 2018, when Anne and Michael met each other after her performance of Mason Bates's Violin Concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony. The two met for lunch, and Michael presented Anne the idea: a violin concerto about Amelia Earhart. It was a little bit out-of-the-blue - Amelia Earhart?

Composer Michael Daugherty and violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. Image courtesy Anne Akiko Meyers.

"Then I started researching about Miss Amelia, Queen of the Air, and I was just flabbergasted," Anne said. "She was such an extraordinary woman, a woman ahead of her time, with her pioneering approach to life, her courage, her bravery, her advocacy for women's rights. I've become an obsessed fan!"

The violin concerto "is very lyrically beautiful," Meyers said. "I really love the way that Michael tells a story - there is always a narrative throughout his music. 'Blue Electra' is melodious and incredibly accessible. He makes it easy for me to share the story. There's everything from super-high notes to swooping figures. There are bellies of notes where you feel like you're flying on the fingerboard, and there are harmonics, where you feel like you're dropping out of the sky."

Earhart's story has a number of dimensions. Nearly 100 years ago, in June 1928, she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic, in a 21-hour flight on a three-engine plane, from Newfoundland to Wales. After that she became a visiting professor at Purdue University as an advisor to aeronautical engineering and a career counselor to female students. And throughout her life Earhart also wrote poetry.

Her poetry factors into the four-movement violin concerto, which has two movements directly inspired by her poems. The first movement, "Courage (1928)," takes its name and inspiration from a poem that Earhart wrote right before that famous first flight across the Atlantic, describing the nature of courage. The second movement, "Paris (1932)," imagines Earhart as a guest of honor celebrating at a high-society "Hot Jazz" soirée in Paris, following her acceptance of Legion of Honor from the French Government, in recognition for that historic trans-Atlantic flight.

BELOW: Anne Akiko Meyers performs "Paris" from the 2022 world premiere of "Blue Electra" with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda:

From the giddy high of Earhart's defining accomplishment, the violin concerto then returns to an earlier period in her life for the third movement, called "From an Airplane (1921)," taking inspiration from an early poem she wrote about the world from a pilot's view, written when her dream of becoming a pilot was still in its infancy.

"Every time I play 'Blue Electra,' I am reminded of her bravery and her courage," Meyers said. "It's empowering, to share this beautiful story about how she felt in the sky - the feeling of being free, being like a hawk and looking down at the Earth and seeing life go by. Or looking from the ground and seeing the clouds, and imagining herself floating in those clouds."

The last movement, called "Last Flight (1937)" takes a darker turn, painting a picture of Earhart's attempt to fly around the world in her "Electra" airplane, only to run out of fuel and disappear somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

In that movement Daugherty dramatizes the cold, a fall from the sky, a radio signal that never gets answered, and the silence that follows. Towards the end of the movement, the violin produces a high pitch that changes the atmosphere. "That note - it just pierces you," Meyers said. "This is the moment that she falls from the sky. This power that she had as a human being and as a spirit, it's pierced, and it falls to the ground, like a bird."

"And the ending - you feel like you're wading through water that is rising," Meyers said. "It's swampy and it's dark. It's an S.O.S. from beyond. She was still alive for several days after she landed the plane. What is extraordinary is that her calls were heard all around the world - even a little girl in Florida heard Amelia's S.O.S. on a radio transmitter."

"What Daugherty did musically in the very ending is a first for me: I start quietly with just an open G string, and I'm just scrubbing, scrubbing, getting louder: fortissimo, triple fortissimo, quadruple fortissimo, as many fortissimos as possible!" Meyers said. "The whole collective orchestra joins and is also doing that together, and it sounds like the entire hall vibrates. It's her plane, it's the engine, it's the blade that is turning, and you feel like, oh my god, Amelia! Amelia!"

By now, Meyers is a master commissioner of new works, having worked over her career with dozens of composers to produce new works for violin, from her recent Latin Grammy-award-winning "Fandango" violin concerto written for her by Arturo Marquez, to works contemporary greats including Arvo Pärt, Einojuhani Rautavaara, John Corigliano, Philip Glass, Michael Daugherty, Mason Bates, Adam Schoenberg (viol, Billy Childs, Jakub Ciupinski, Jennifer Higdon, Morten Lauridsen, Wynton Marsalis, Somei Satoh, Joseph Schwantner, and Eric Whitacre.

"All of these composers amaze me - they have this imagination that pushes me to new creative places that I wouldn't have ever dreamed of going on my own," Meyers said. "I am so inspired by their musical minds and how they can create something like musical painting, or even a poem, and make that come alive through music. It's eternal, what can be said through music."

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Interview with Anne Akiko Meyers: 'Blue Electra' Violin Concerto

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