After a relaxing year away in New England, I’m very excited for my first DC premiere since returning to the area. With a little help from my friends the Great Noise Ensemble, Her Exit will be premiered along with 12 other new works at the Atlas Theatre on Saturday, September 21st at 8pm. Tickets here. Each composer involved in the project was asked to write a piece in response to a particular track on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album: my track was She’s Leaving Home.

When I started thinking about this project, the perspective of the lyrics in She’s Leaving Home really stuck out at me: the story is delivered by an omniscient outsider, seemingly gazing down at the characters as their lives play out. After finding out that the song was written about a real person and an actual sequence of events that Paul McCartney read about in the newspaper, I thought it would be interesting to try to write my piece solely from the perspective of the pregnant teenage runaway. In Her Exit, I tried to create a musical world that’s the polar opposite of the sweet and delicate She’s Leaving Home, akin to looking at a photographic negative image of the Beatles’ presentation of the story. Hope to see you there.