The concert closed with the delightful (and delightfully titled) Whack! by Art Gottschalk which pulled together the pitched and unpitched resources of the large percussion ensemble with a recorded electro-acoustic medium. The work itself acknowledges the debt all composers of on this concert owe to the work of Carl Stalling who, in his Warner Brothers cartoon soundtracks, blurred the line between music and sound effect. Whack! manages to pull off the difficult trick of putting humor in a concert work without sacrificing compositional integrity, in a very enjoyable way.
– Joseph Harchanko
