La Folia
The following article was borrowed from
http://www.lafolia.com/archive/brown/
brown200510galas.html
Defixiones,
a Performance Work
by Diamanda Galás
Howard Grady Brown
[October 2005.]
Like the pedal notes that
begin Der Ring des Nibelungen and Also Sprach
Zarathustra, a deep, a slowly amplified bass note underscores a
horrific narrative. Thus begins Defixiones, Orders From The Dead,
a music-theater piece by Diamanda Galás, performed by the composer on
September 8 and 10 at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the
Arts, in New York City.
From the program notes:
“Defixiones
refers to the warnings engraved in lead […] placed on the graves of
the dead in Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere in the Middle East. They
cautioned against moving or desecrating the corpses under threat of
extreme harm. Orders From The Dead refers to the last
wishes of the dead […] taken to their graves under unnatural
circumstances. Defixiones, Orders From The Dead speaks
for individuals who have had to live as outlaws, as they were treated
as outlaws; and for those who have had to create houses out of rock.
Defixiones, Orders From The Dead, is dedicated to the
forgotten and erased of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides
[of] Asia Minor, Pontos and Thrace between 1914-1923.”
This 70-minute work — the
performance differed in a number of details from the recording on
Mute Records STUMM 205 — has been performed several times in the US
and Europe. The performance I attended included settings of poems not
found in the recording, lengthening the work by about a third. The
texts, in all cases, include poems and accounts of the genocides in
Anatolia. A tone of outrage and a demand for recognition and justice —
even revenge — permeate.
Diamanda Galás’ voice is
an incredible instrument, spanning a range (it is claimed — I have no
reason to doubt) of four octaves, which she wields like a weapon: moans,
howls, shrieks, whispers, keens and croons, as the text requires. She
recites as often as she sings, and in her recitations, each syllable is
given equal weight until ululation takes over, spun and whirled as if a
spell were being cast on those guilty of the atrocities. The poems by
Yannis Ritsos, Atom Yarjanian, Ali Ahmad Said, Freidoun Bet-Oraham, Dido
Soteriou, Giorgos Seferis, and Diamanda Galás cited in the program are
in Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, English, and in one notorious example,
Turkish: “Hatred,” published in a Turkish newspaper before Turkey
invaded Cypress in 1974, depicting Greeks in a manner similar to the
Japanese in American posters and films between 1941 and 1945. Here, no
balanced view of events is admissible, and neither the subject nor the
manner in which it is expressed can be called entertainment. I am
reminded of Woody Allen’s character in Stardust Memories,
upon whose apartment wall is an enormous blowup of the famous photo of
General Nguyen Loan executing a Viet Cong terrorist. So too with this
account of genocide from the second decade of the last century. In a
spirit of confrontation, the work demands that a culture not be
forgotten.
At the performance I
attended the house was full. A man and woman seated next to me had come
up from Baltimore. Now in his 20s, the man has followed Ms. Galás’
career since he was 14. The attraction has to be the texts’ contents as
much as their execution, though the two are fused in an extraordinary
manner. I was reminded of the Shostakovich Eighth Symphony, in which the
very form of the work seems to support the need to scream, mourn, bear
witness to the unspeakable. In this case, there is no time to mourn. The
need to bear witness and curse the outrage against humanity overwhelms
all other emotions. Is this inability to mourn a weakness of the piece,
or is the voice of the dispossessed of Anatolia so foreign to my
experience that I cannot hear the mourning buried within rage?
The only instrument
onstage was a piano. The work relies on extensive amplification and
electronic processing, as well as taped voiceovers. During one passage,
piano chords seem to have been electronically altered to sound like an
insidious machine. A tape loop of the sound accompanied the horrific
account of Armenian women burned alive.
Diamanda Galás has won
praise in some quarters as a pianist — The Age
(Australia), The Vancouver Sun and the L.A. Weekly,
in particular — but the pounding ostinatos and tinkling figurations
among the high-octave white keys did not convince me that the praise is
justified. Her technique certainly supports her performance, and yet it
is not of the order of an Ursula Oppens, Yvonne Loriod, Martha Argerich
or, in another vein, Diana Krall. To be fair, Prokofiev and Messiaen are
not Galás’ fach, and neither is dazzling jazz
improvisation. When she does address popular or traditional material,
she works it to the nth degree. Her performance of “See That My Grave Is
Kept Clean” on disc two of the Mute recording of Defixiones
reminds me of Nina Simone and Janis Joplin in personal identification
with the lyric, with her voice going well beyond the ability of either
Simone or Joplin to match concept with execution. I would refer anyone
to the two-disc set as an illustration.
She is a fierce onstage
presence. In the performance I attended Galás materialized out of the
dark in a black robe with metallic trim: the chorus in Greek tragedy —
in this case, a chorus of one. Over the pedal point she began ululating
into the microphone, and I could only wonder how much the power of the
voice depended on amplification. Could the performance have as much
force were it unamplified? But this was not a recital of Lieder or opera
arias. Galás borrows the devices of popular music and culture,
specifically, a battery of loudspeakers pointed out at the audience and
several aimed back at her, the better to hear herself over the processed
sounds.
I still have to wonder how
effective Defixiones might have been were the trappings of
popular culture — especially the omnipresent microphones held to the
face — dropped in favor of a human scale. Does the potency of the work
depend upon the volume at which it is presented, or are the material and
wide-ranging voice sufficient to hold our attention? Must everything be
pushed to rock-concert levels before we pay attention? Unfortunately,
her audience — those who follow her work and point of view regarding the
world in general — not only accept the rock-concert aesthetic, they
would be disappointed by its absence. Even when Eric Clapton went
“acoustic,” the mics and amps were on. How else could a large audience
experience the new sound? The setting for Defixiones,
however, was fairly intimate. The Pace University hall’s volume seemed
to me close to Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. If Galás’ intent was
to batter the audience with a raw voice bearing witness to an atrocity,
she succeeded.
[See also
http://www.diamandagalas.com/
defixiones/defixiones.htm.]
[Galáswise I lost my
virginity at a 1982 Hollywood show of Wild Women with Steak Knives.
Certainly the sense of being shut in with a lunatic was palpable; if the
idea thrills (Marat/Sade writ very, very small), Ms. Galás will
leave you ecstatic but even multi-channel DVD can’t reproduce the live
event’s impact. Besides, a large component is surrendering control; if
you command the remote, so to speak, the experience is fatally
compromised. W.M.]