Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás is an American musician, singer-songwriter, visual artist, and activist. Galás has attracted the attention of the press particularly for her voice – a soprano sfogato – and written accounts that describe her work as original and thought-provoking refer to her as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", an "aesthetic revolutionary", "a mourner for the world's victims" and "an envoy of risk, honesty and commitment".
As a composer, pianist, organist and performance artist, Galás has presented mainly her own work, but her live performances have also included works by other musicians, such as the avant-garde composers Iannis Xenakis and Vinko Globokar, jazz musician Bobby Bradford, saxophonist John Zorn, and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Galás's recordings have also included collaborations, some of which are with the bands Recoil and Erasure, instrumentalist Barry Adamson, and musician Can Oral, among others.
Background and education
Galás was born and raised in San Diego, California, to a Maniot Greek-American mother from Dover, New Hampshire, Georgianna Koutrelakos-Galás, and an Egyptian Greek father from Lynn, Massachusetts, James Galás. Both parents were Greek Orthodox but considered themselves agnostic. Her father's Greek ancestors were from Smyrna, Pontus, and Chios, while one of his grandmothers was an Egyptian from Alexandria. Galás does not refer to her Smyrniote and Pontic ancestry as "Turkish", but rather as Anatolian.Galás's first contact with music was during her childhood in San Diego, where her parents lived and worked as teachers. Her father, who was also a gospel choir director, taught her how to play the piano when she was three years old, while introducing her later to classical music, the New Orleans jazz tradition, rebetika and other classics of his Greek heritage, some blues standards, and other historical music genres. Galas also took cello and violin lessons, and studied a wide range of musical forms. By the age of fourteen, she had been playing gigs in San Diego with her father's band, performing Greek and Arabic music, and she had also made her orchestral debut with the San Diego Symphony as the soloist for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. But while her father encouraged her to play the piano, he did not want her to sing because he believed that singing was for "hookers and idiots."
Galás and her brother Phillip-Dimitri acquired a taste for dark literature at an early age. Their inspirations were the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and Edgar Allan Poe.
In the 1970s, Galás studied biochemistry at the University of Southern California, specializing in immunology and hematology studies. Her post-graduate studies include a master's program in the music department of the University of California, San Diego, which encouraged her to work at its Center for Music Experiment to develop her own vocal technique. Outside academia, Galás's vocal training was supported by private lessons in San Diego with bel canto tutor Frank Kelly, and with voice coaches Vicky Hall in Berlin and Barbara Maier Gustern in New York.
Music
Early years (1970s–1986)
In the early 1970s, Galás and her friend contra-bass player Mark Dresser joined the jazz band Black Music Infinity, which included drummer Stanley Crouch, trumpeter Bobby Bradford, cornetist Butch Morris, flautist James Newton, and saxophonist David Murray. She later collaborated with members of the San Diego band CETA VI, which included, among others, jazz saxophonist Jim French, with whom Galás went on to record and release her first compositions, as part of the album If Looks Could Kill, together with guitarist and sound engineer Henry Kaiser.At the same time, Galás was preparing for her live solo debut, which took place at the 1979 Festival d'Avignon, in France, where she was doing post-graduate studies. It was a performance of Vinko Globokar's Un Jour Comme un Autre, an opera based on Amnesty International's documentation about the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. Globokar was the director of the Instruments and Voice department at the music and sound research center IRCAM, where Galás had been doing further experimentation on her vocal technique. During her time in Paris, Galás also met the Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis, whose composition Akanthos she sang with IRCAM's Ensemble InterContemporain in 1980, while she was still in Europe. After her return to the US, Galás performed one more work by Xenakis, his composition N'Shima, in the US premiere of it in New York in 1981, alongside soprano Genevieve Renon-McLaughlin, who sang one of the two vocal parts of this piece.
Her first solo album, The Litanies of Satan, was also an operatic work. It included only two compositions: a twelve-minute piece entitled 'Wild Women with Steak-Knives', which was described by Galás in the album notes as tragedy-grotesque deriving from her work "Eyes Without Blood", and another lengthy composition, 'Litanies of Satan', an adaptation to music of a section from Charles Baudelare's poem Les Fleurs du Mal. Her second album, Diamanda Galas, also contained two lengthy compositions. They were 'Panoptikon', which was dedicated to Jack Henry Abbott, whose 1981 autobiographical book In the Belly of the Beast described his experience of the prison system, and 'Tragoudia Apo To Aima Exoun Fonos', a Greek-language piece dedicated to those political prisoners who were either murdered or executed during the Greek military regimes in the years 1967–74.
Mute Records (1986–2008)
Galás began writing and performing on the subject of AIDS around 1984, while living in San Francisco. This theme resulted in the trilogy Masque of the Red Death, an operatic trilogy which included The Divine Punishment, Saint of the Pit and You Must Be Certain of the Devil. In these three works Galás detailed the suffering of people with AIDS. Shortly after the recording of the trilogy's first volume began, her brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, became sick with AIDS, which inspired her to join activist groups that raised awareness about this new illness. Her brother died in 1986, just before the completion of the trilogy.Taking a break from her own recordings, Galás appeared on the 1989 studio album Moss Side Story by Barry Adamson. In Moss Side Story, which was described by the press as a "soundtrack for a non-existent film-noir", Galás sang the opening track, 'On the Wrong Side of Relaxation'. In 1992, Galás released the album Vena Cava, a series of unaccompanied voice pieces recorded in New York during a live performance at The Kitchen. For her next record, Galás changed stylistic direction by turning to the blues tradition and interpreting a wide range of songs with only a piano and solo voice. This stylistic turn produced the studio album The Singer, on which she covered songs by Willie Dixon, Roy Acuff, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, as well as "Gloomy Sunday", a song written by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress in 1933 and translated into English by Desmond Carter. This material formed the basis of the video Judgement Day, which was released in 1993.
In the next three years, Galás returned to collaborations with other musicians. She first worked with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, a longtime admirer of her work, to write material for a record, and the album The Sporting Life was produced with him in 1994. A tour that followed the album's release saw the two musicians performing together live on stage as well as on the popular MTV show The Jon Stewart Show. Then, in the same year, two of Galás's songs from her previous album were featured on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers. In 1995, Galás contributed vocals to the eponymous album of British synth-pop duo Erasure at the invitation of the lead singer, Andy Bell, and the following year she took part in the album Closed on Account of Rabies, a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe which also included Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry and Marianne Faithfull, who lent their voices to the tales of the legendary author. Galás' reading of "The Black Cat" was the longest recording on the compilation.
In 1998, Galás released Malediction and Prayer, which was recorded live in 1996 and 1997. In 2000, Galás worked with Recoil by contributing her voice to the album Liquid. She was the lead vocalist on the album's first single, "Strange Hours", for which she also wrote the lyrics, and can be heard on "Jezebel" and "Vertigen" as a backing vocalist.
Galás's next project revolved around the Armenian, Anatolian-Greek and Assyrian genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923. This work took the title 'Defixiones – Will and Testament' in reference to the last wishes of the dead who had been taken to their graves under extreme circumstances, as 'defixiones' in Greece and Asia Minor is associated with the warnings written on gravestones by relatives of the dead to warn people against desecrating them. This material formed part of the 80-minute long album Defixiones: Will and Testament, which was released simultaneously with La Serpenta Canta, a live album including cover versions recorded between May 1999 and November 2002. One of the unaccompanied vocal pieces from Defixiones: Will and Testament, "Orders from the Dead", was later used on the album Aealo by Greek black metal band Rotting Christ.
In 2008, Galás released her seventh live album, Guilty Guilty Guilty, a collection of cover songs that she used to play as a piano accompanist in her father's band when she was young. The album emerged from material she began to work on around the time when her parents – to whom it is dedicated – happened to stay in the same hospital at the same time for different treatments; seeing how they handled it and how they held hands and took courage from each other during that time reminded her of the love songs she had learned in her father's band. Galás has stated that these songs also made her explore her own emotions at a time when a long-term personal relationship had ended, particularly Henderson's and Brown's "The Thrill Is Gone", a song performed by Chet Baker and others. This set of new re-interpretations of old, love songs was recorded live at Galás's Valentine's Day concert at New York's Knitting Factory in 2006.