m i n e s w e e p e r  

Instrumentation:             unspecified instrument(s) and/or voice(s)  

Duration:                       2’         

Performance details:      28.10.2006; Lincoln Center, New York; New York Miniaturist Ensemble.        

No excerpts are currently available             Click hear to see sketches

For details of hiring the sheet music, please contact David

Minesweeper is a game common to most general purpose PCs.  It consists of a 16 by 32 square grid in which 99 mines are randomly hidden.  When a square is uncovered, number patterns appear which determine how many mines are touching a particular square.  The aim of the game is to locate all the mines, without setting any off. 

In playing the game, I became interested in the game’s random number patterns and the visual aesthetic that the organization creates, and these were my germs in conceiving a piece of music based on the game.  My original plans were to use the numbers patterns along with rigidity of the grid framework, but increasingly I wanted to also portray the randomness of the mine configuration and improvisatory nature of the game’s playing style.  By integrating these elements into a graphical score, the visual aesthetic of the numbers patterns can be reflected in the score and also suggest an artistic form to the performer.

Like the game, the score has a 16 by 32 grid which house 99 ‘notes’.  Although technically the notes are not random, as they have been designed subjectively, I have tried to recapture a typical organization of mines, in which clusters are contrasted with space.  This contrast between clusters and spaces in a supposedly random texture is the most importance element in interpreting the score.

Although other guidelines should not be given to the interpretation, the random eye movement in playing the game was a major factor in composition, and appears to have also been a factor in performance.