One to One (IRS Practitioner Priority Line Extended)

In 2009, an IRS official named Christina Navarette-Wasson convened a small committee to address a complaint that had accumulated for two decades: the IRS had been playing excerpts from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker as its hold music, and callers kept calling in from March to complain about Christmas. Five candidate tracks were played. A flute-and-piano loop from a royalty-free collection called Fresh Optimism was chosen. The composer is unknown — the track is credited only to a corporate entity in Tivoli, New York, later absorbed into Getty Images like so many small optimisms. That 30-second loop has been on hold ever since. At any given moment, using nothing fancier than Little's Law, somewhere between five and eleven thousand people are listening to it simultaneously.

This piece begins where that loop does — a single flute entering without announcement over sparse piano, patient and slightly unresolved, the way a melody sounds when no one was trying to make art. It breathes through a mid-section where strings arrive like a second shift, warm and unhurried, before thinning back out. By the end only the flute remains, slowing, letting go. The call, in this version, does not get answered. The music simply stops — which is its own kind of resolution.

A note from the archive: when the Washington Post's classical music critic called the IRS and sat on hold for an hour, she wrote that the music had a Spielberg quality — she knew she was being manipulated, but she didn't mind. One caller told the IRS they had spent untold hours singing and whistling harmony and counterpoint to this beautiful music. Another asked for a ten-hour loop because it was the only thing that calmed their German shepherd. That is the strange afterlife of functional music: designed not to be noticed, it becomes, for some people, the thing they remember most about the wait.