Resanovic, Nikola - alt.music.ballistix

for soprano saxophone and soundscape

Nikola Resanovic was born in 1955- and originally wrote this piece for clarinet.

"Bearing a title suggestive of a fictitious news group, “alt.music.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 downloading the latest NASDAQ figures via his cell phone/modem onto his laptop 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 strait-jacket; a clarinet with an accordion, tambourine and modem.

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 commodities-anticipatory silence!).

Mvt. 2: “A Soliloquy” (A three minute, 11 tone, unaccompanied clarinet solo based on every pitch but ‘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@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)"

Nikola Resanovic