...The closing work was one of the most interesting (and entertaining) of the Conference. Entitled Alt.Music ballistix for Clarinet and Tape by Resanovic, it opened with industrial noises, including the sounds of an overseas telephone operator combined with a lyrical clarinet line, then moved into an ersatz folk dance complete with synthesised accordion and percussion sounds. This was extremely fast and energetic. Then the piece closed with more of the opening, including requests for passwords and counter signs which were incorrect. All in all, a sort of parody of modern life, but with a human response in the middle....
Floyd WilliamsBearing a title suggestive of a fictitious internet news group, "alt.music.ballistix" is an electro-acoustic composition scored for solo clarinet and digital audio tape which I composed for Professor Hakan Rosengren in the fall of 1995. The 12 minute work is divided into four contiguous movements as follows:
Mvt. 1 - "A Matter of Fax" ( a three-minute sonic montage featuring original samples from various technological sources including a fax/modem, telephone, short-wave radio, satellite transmissions, mingled with the most precious of all musical comoditiesÑ silence!)
Mvt. 2 - "A Soliloquy" (a three-minute, 11-tone, unaccompanied clarinet solo based on every pitch but the pitch 'D' which appears later as an accompanimental 'ison' or drone)
Mvt. 3 - "A Balkan Dance" (influenced by Macedonian and Bulgarian dance idioms, the movement features many references to the folk music of this region of the Balkans.)
Mvt. 4 - Convolution@dax.cc.uakron.edu (The above three movements are polyphonically combined, and a fourth elementÑthe unrelentingly polite voice-mail ladyÑis injected into the sonic recipe.)
"Ballistix" is a musical representation of some of the bizarre realities of our modern era of digital communications and information. It is the metaphor of the seemingly backwards peasant down-loading the latest nasdaq figures via his cell phone/modem onto his lap-top computer in some remote region of the BalkansÑhis cows grazing in the background. This juxtaposition of the modern and the timeless, the sophisticated and the simple, the sublime and the ridiculous, expresses itself in a music which combines "atonality" with the 'ison'; "emancipated rhythm" with a metric straight-jacket; a clarinet with an accordion, tambourine and modem. "Ballistix" is convolved music: it takes musical events that seem isolated and unrelated at there first presentation and restates them in a contrapuntally intertwined manner. In this new context these same musical events are transformed by their very interaction as they combine to reveal a higher order of relationships.
"Ballistix" was premiered at the Pitea festival in Sweden during the summer of 1997 by Hakan Rosengren who was Clarinetist in residence at the University of Akron from 1995-1999 and is presently on the faculty of California State University at Fullerton, CA. The work has since been performed by numerous clarinetists around the world and throughout the United States.
And now for those of you nintendo-heads out there. "Ballistix" was realized using the following equipment: A Kurzweil K2000s sampling keyboard and synthesizer; an Alesis ADAT 8-track digital audio tape recorder; a Panasonic 3700 DAT recorder; a DATAsync syncbox; a Mac Classic; a PowerMac 7100AV; MasterTracks Pro. 5 sequencing software. a Mackie 1202 mixer; a Carvin 1688 8-bus mixer, and an Electrovoice EV20 microphone.
N. Resanovic