From: Here/There/Now/Then (6/17/05)
Notes for:

Nikola Resanovic: alt.music.ballistix for Clarinet and Soundfile (1995)
(notes by the composer, as found on his website: www.nikolaresanovic.com)

Bearing a title suggestive of a fictitious interrnet 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 comodities - 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@dat.cc.uakron.edu (The above three movements are polyphonically combined, and a fourth element - the unrelentingly polite voice-mail lady - is 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 Balkans - his 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 convoluted music:  it takes musical events that seem isolated and unrelated at their 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.