Onde Sul Campo Minato (Waves on the Mine Sweeper)

Abstract

The very first idea for the piece was generated by the game “Mined field” (see the on-line rules on the computer to understand what follows) which is usually installed with FreeCell, Hearts and other games in the Windows directory called “games”. The observation of the casual distribution of mines and relative numbers (indispensable to the player for the individuation of the mines) pulled us to assign a musical component to every element in the field. So we built a square of 7 x 7 cells where we disposed 49 strings. We overlapped it to many bigger mined fields (9 x 9 with 10 mines) in order to have, at any new game, a different quantity of mines and numbers falling inside the 7 x 7 square. Only numbers 1, 2 and 3 were considered (we discarded the rarer number 4, sometimes present in the field because of the setting mentioned above). This was due to a chosen economy of means. To be honest, this kind of procedure is peculiar of the music starting from I and ending in O (included). So, part of the subtitle of the piece is to be referred to this section.The audience will sit down among the musicians and face the director as the musicians do (see the disposition of the instruments on the score). We foresee a minimum of one row of audience (horizontal and vertical) between two rows of musicians, but more rows can be inserted.Before going on, let us pass to other points: waves, motives and the Theme. The second proceeding is the waves’ one. It is based on the passage of musical elements either among instruments with the same number (in the mined field section waves proceeding is assigned to number 1, the most frequent) or following geometric movements inspired by light games in the light/illuminated signs. Not for nothing all the strings are disposed in a specific way in order to permit many combinations of motion and to create appropriate zones of different sound density. In addition to this we inserted a rhythmical rapid movement (assigned to number 2) and glissandos (assigned to number 3) as motives, and a short Theme (assigned to the mines). We remember that a strict employment of such a project is applied in the mined field section only, as showed in the following brief analysis.In short we have: two proceedings (let us call “Waves” and “Mined Field” referring to I-O section), two motives (fast notes and glissando), one Theme.