Your Call is Important to Us: for violin and soundtrack

A company makes a mistake. A telephone call is made to try to correct it. A maze of menu options confound the caller. The company puts the caller on hold, offering insincere automated apologies. The caller is forced to listen to poorly-recorded music, punctuated by, “Your positon in the queue is...”
Your Call is Important to Us for violin and on-hold sounds was premiered by Madeleine Mitchell on 17 March 2022 in the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Manchester UK. The piece exclusively uses voices and music collected over the previous three years using a digital recorder's microphone to capture phone calls from the miniature speaker of a smartphone, thus preserving the caller's traumatc and crackling sonic experience. This piece marks the beginning of a series of works which document the citizen's (eg the composer's) batles with Vodafone, Trafford City Council, GOV.UK, HMRC, The Guardian, Center State Bank, AA Insurance, and several dozen more organisatons who assure the populaton that callers' recordings are necessary for quality and training purposes. The work was released on Naxos CD 8574560 in 2023.