The Play of All Time

La jugada de todos los tiempos / The Play of All Time (2022) Ediciones Negra40, Barcelona.

A book containing two sound-poetry pieces with instructions for performance: “La jugada de todos los tiempos” (2022) and “Vocal-a” (2017). Presented in June 2022 at the Animal Sospechoso bookshop in Barcelona, and that same November at the Suena Washington space. Graphic design: Mariano Losi.

Download an excerpt of the book (PDF)

Foreword

In May 2020, writer Pablo Brescia asked me to write the essay “Maradona y la música” for the book Diego Armando Maradona: A Socio-cultural Study, the first volume devoted to the star’s impact on contemporary culture. I focused on an experimental idea: that from the age of 11, Diego’s body received the asymmetric impact of a sound produced by thousands of people in stadiums and in the street, and that the way his body absorbed and returned those sounds to society was the trigger for a vast body of songs still multiplying today like an inexhaustible echo. The piece “La jugada de todos los tiempos,” for two reciters, is one more case of that particular semiosis born from the encounter between Maradona’s sound and the forms of cultural appropriation art offers.

This sound takes me back to an emblematic Baroque musical form, the fugue: a principal theme that flees across a piece while other themes try to catch it in a dizzying contrapuntal chase. If Bach — the composer who probably crowned this technique — had watched Maradona play, I think, he would have made him its consecrated subject. Since history didn’t allow us that indulgence, well, I took on the job myself.

The second piece, “Vocal-a” (2014, eight years before “La jugada”), is a poem about the space a voice occupies in a place, and about how that space is constitutive of its timbral nature. My voice doesn’t sound the same in my bathroom, in a taxi, or in a concert hall: it has no fixed sound, it’s an abstraction, inescapably bound to where it’s produced. That’s why “Vocal-a” is a poem with instructions for performance: published, yes, but only to be spoken, performed.

I leave the encounter of these two works open to whoever wants to get involved in reading and performing them. In both — I’ll only say this — excess and calm circle each other, the feint, the acceleration and the pause: gestures that put music and football in phase with one another.

Martín Virgili Heidelberg, spring 2022