THE BOSTON PHOENIX
The following article was
borrowed from
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/music/other_stories/
documents/04935038.asp
Historical notes
Diamanda Galás prepares to perform a new Defixiones
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
Diamanda
Galás has had a talent for plucking beauty from the maw of horror for
more than 20 years — right from her first solo recording, 1984’s
Diamanda Galás (Metalanguage), which explored the psychology of
imprisonment in "Panoptikon" and commemorated those killed by the
1967-’74 Greek junta in "Tragouthia apo to aima exoun phonos," which
translates as "Song from the Blood of Those Murdered." But her latest
concert work, the Mass Defixiones: Will and Testament — Orders from
the Dead, which gets its East Coast debut at New York City’s
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University in
performances September 8 and 10, is her most harrowing opus.
That’s
saying a lot, since performances of Insekta found her suspended
over the stage in a cage like a laboratory animal, Plague Mass
explored the AIDS pandemic, and Vena Cava was a painfully literal
representation of organic dementia spun from Galás’s incendiary vocal
technique and her experience with the ill and dying.
But there’s a passage in the first movement of Defixiones
that’s a peek into the blackest heart of man. As Galás intones what
sounds like a Christian liturgical melody crossed with a muezzin’s
call, she sings of a group of women who are raped, stripped, and
forced to dance in a circle as they’re whipped by soldiers, who
eventually tire of the vile amusement and set them afire with
kerosene. "I slammed my shutters," declares the passage’s narrator,
who has watched from a window, "and asked, ‘How can I dig out my
eyes?’ " Later the same section of Defixiones, which draws on
the poetry of Ali Ahmad Said (who writes under the pseudonym Adonis)
and other Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian writers, recounts a forced
march into the desert, where troops dismember the marchers.
The story evolves into a tale of remembrance and honor of the
victims of the genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, and Anatolian and
Pontic Greeks that Turks carried out from 1914 to 1923 — atrocities
that the Turkish government has denied. "Most of my work has been
about social justice," Galás says over the phone from her New York
City apartment, "but Defixiones is especially important to me
because my father is a Greek from Smyrna, so I’ve heard stories of the
genocides since I was growing up."
For Galás, the 75-minute performance is emotionally and physically
demanding, with some of her most rhythmic and powerful vocalizing and
a darkly exploratory and textural piano approach that requires sharp
improvisational abilities. It’s also become quite different from the
2003 Mute Records double-CD version of Defixiones, which has
even more demanding piano-based numbers that tap all her jazz-bred
dexterity plus the country blues standard "See That My Grave Is Kept
Clean," which closes the recording. She explains, "I had to extract
the pieces that were in song form from the work, which is really more
of a mass or opera, because I felt they weren’t in keeping with the
character of the rest of the piece, which draws on different languages
and poetic texts and historical accounts. They’ve become part of a
song-based performance called ‘Guilty, Guilty, Guilty’ that I’ll be
performing in Australia in October."
Even as her command of longer, conceptual works has grown more
masterful, Galás has continued to explore short songs, taking tunes by
Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, the Supremes, and others
and stretching them with her three-and-a-half-octave range in all
directions. Through deft, dark turns and sudden firebombs of vocal
expression, she gives their time-tested stories of loss, spiritual
disconnection, and retribution a contemporary sensibility.
And, as with her long-form pieces, she’s always tinkering with her
song-based programs too. "You know how it is when you love music. You
just can’t stop, and you won’t listen if anybody tells you to. There’s
always something out there beckoning."
Her musical career began in the 1970s on the West Coast, where she
played jazz piano with saxophonist David Murray and began performing
with a circle of improvisers that included guitarist Henry Kaiser. She
transposed the freedom she’d earned on the keyboard to her voice, an
astonishing instrument with a staggering palette of tones and
emotional colors. By the time she began making her own albums, Galás
was working with multiple microphones and an array of delays,
choruses, and other electronic effects. And though she’s recorded and
performed with other musicians since establishing herself — notably on
a 1994 tour and Mute-label album The Sporting Life with Led
Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones — her piano and her voice remain her
musical bedrock.
If you’re wondering why Galás isn’t performing Defixiones in
Boston, it’s because of a foul-up she experienced at the hands of a
now-estranged booking agent last year that caused her planned 2004
tour to be cancelled. Music-business politics appears to have kept the
local date from being rescheduled here, where Galás has a large, loyal
base of fans. "I was really disappointed about letting my fans down
and it crippled me financially, but that guy" — whom she prefers not
to name — "is a motherfucker and he needs to be reckoned with, and I’m
going to do it." She’s seeking an attorney.
Although Defixiones was completed, at least in its original
version, in 1999, the work has taken on additional resonance. Its
passages about building walls, literal and metaphorical, as a result
of terror echo the Bush administration’s isolationist attitudes, and a
poem about the invasion of Beirut draws a direct line from a century
ago to the present. There’s also the significance of September, the
month in 1922 when Greeks in Smyrna were massacred as sailors aboard
British warships looked on, the month in 1955 when the last large
upsurge in Turkish violence against Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians
took place, and, of course, the month of our own September 11.
"Maybe making connections like that can help Americans understand
that other cultures have had to endure even more terrible experiences
and help us all understand that every ethnicity shares these common,
horrible experiences," Galás observes, "whether you’re in Rwanda or
Smyrna or New York."
Diamanda Galás | Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace
University, 3 Spruce St, Manhattan | September 8 + 10 at 8 pm |
212.279.4200
Issue Date: September 2 - 8, 2005