05/29/2026
Leah Reid is one of our Call for Scores winners for this year's festival! Tickets are still available for our concerts Friday through Sunday.
Join the movement and help us change the canon, one concert at a time.
Crossed Wires is an immersive composition for amplified viola, percussion, and electronics,
commissioned by the Piedmont Duo.
The piece is centered around sounds associated with telephones, communication, and
miscommunication. The work touches on both historical and modern devices associated with
the theme – from antique phones and mid-century landlines to modern cellphones. Sounds in
the work include clicks and beeps from picking up, setting down, or turning off phones, dial
tones, telephones vibrating and ringing, busy signals, out of service messages, fax machines,
customer service interactions, “hold music”, answering machines, and more.
The work also explores instrumental synthesis and the timbral relationships between the
themed and instrumental sounds. Hundreds of string and percussion recordings are added to
the telephone/communication materials, building up the textures, and transforming the
themed recordings into instrumentally synthesized versions of the original.
