Composer Gavin Bryars introduces 'A Man in a Room, Gambling', his musical collaboration with the artist Juan Muñoz. The project mixes Bryars' score with the recorded voice of the artist as he reads texts on strategies for manipulating cards when gambling.
[Music of strings] Juan Muñoz (recording): Good evening, and welcome once again to A Man in a Room, Gambling. [Music] As we promised yesterday, we will explain for to perform the old and worthy trick: ‘three card’. You have noticed this trick a few times on the streets of your town centre…. Gavin Bryars: A Man in a Room Gambling is a piece, it’s a collaboration between me, the composer, and Juan Muñoz, a sculptor. And he decided he’d like to do a piece for radio, and I was sort of curious as to what a piece by a sculptor on radio would sound like – I imagined someone just hitting a chisel on a block of wood, and I thought it had a sort of fairly limited appeal. But he’s not that kind of sculptor anyway. Well, for me Juan was one of the really great artists. He was a Spanish sculptor, he was only what, forty-eight, not quite forty-nine when he died. There’s no sense of a single style in his work. You will see a series of pieces, and they don’t look like each other. You eventually become aware that it’s the same mind that’s created them. He came up with this idea of something which was really related to the way you hear radio is broadcast, and that is that if maybe five minutes before the last News of the days on the radio, there’s a programme, and this would be our slot, as it were. And he decided to do ten texts based on the writings of a Canadian card sharp, the man who wrote the definitive book on how to cheat at cards, how to manipulate playing cards, at the beginning of last century. [Music] Juan Muñoz: Within recent evenings we have told you about some artifices and subterfuges that you can perform at a gambling table. All we are talking about is the ability to take whatever cards, deal them out, and turn them into a winning hand. Gavin Bryars: There were ten of these texts, and each one is accompanied by music, so that as you are listening to this description, at the same time you are hearing music playing. [Music] Juan Muñoz: And it is true, what mainly distinguishes the professional is that he is driven by his love of the act of gambling, while others are motivated by greed. Gavin Bryars: He envisaged that someone would encounter this broadcast simply by accident, maybe like you’re driving along the motorway and you tune into the News or check the weather – you want to see what’s happening in the world, and you tune in a few minutes early and you hear this thing, and you’re sort of slightly baffled by it, and you hear it in a slightly out of focus way, and then you hear the News, and you’re not quite sure what you’ve heard. Each piece is exactly five minutes long, so it’s designed to fit that kind of slot. Rather like the Shipping Forecast. And the idea of the music, though, is not to draw attention to itself, it’s not there to be heard as great music, it’s there to be integrated with the text. [Music] Juan Muñoz: In this programme we are going to go over one of the routines again, though perhaps a little more briefly than we did last time. [Music] More than any other, this is the artifice which, if done properly, allows the professional gambler to increase his winnings, so that he can then fritter them away. Gavin Bryars: And in a way, performing now, it’s a slightly emotional thing, because Juan was – we were close. And hearing his voice and playing it with his voice – I mean, when he died, I must admit at first I couldn’t do it for a while. But Juan did perform it several times live, and there is some footage when a German television station made a programme about me when we filmed one entire take, of the tenth of the Man in a Room Gambling pieces with Juan reading live. So it’s possible to in fact just see Juan himself performing it, and you’ll see the kind of concentration. He’s not fooling about, he’s concentrating like crazy. Juan Muñoz [Fades in] ...than with gambling as such. [Music] Gavin Bryars: We had lots of plans. We planned to make a kind of chamber opera out of this piece, and the summer he died, we both went away before the summer. I live on the west coast of Canada, so I went to my seaside place, and he went back to Spain, and we said we’d meet afterwards and work on this chamber opera. Then I had a call that he’d died, and so that disappeared. But in fact now I’m making the chamber opera with a group in America, so Juan’s spirit is still alive in that piece.
