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Richmond's Style Weekly Magazine September 15, 1998
Daring Diva
Diamanda Galas dives into the dark corners of her voice and psyche to
produce music of uncommon power
by Cheryl Pallant
Diamanda Galas is anything but mild. Her rare and often raw multioctave
voice goes where few singers dare. Warbling, cackling, ululating,
shrieking, this operatically trained diva challenges listeners with a
voice that plummets primal depths and soars to dizzying heights. With
blues, gospel and jazz songs, and lyrics by writers such as Charles
Baudelaire, Galas launches the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts'
Fast/Forward series with her haunting intensity on Sept. 18 and 19.
Often criticized for her preoccupation with darkness and death, she
believes her performances are life-affirming, a way to balance the
entirety of life, not just its niceties but also its distressing
emotions and situations. Her Greek heritage partly explains how the
dark empowers her. " The daemons in the Greek culture were ferocious
goddesses, feared but real," she says, "You have to have one claw in the
dirt and one in the heavens. Pavarotti is standing deep in the soil.
That's why he's able to make this profound sound; he has the deep
resonance, the woo&127;fer and the tweeter. He's got that combination, and
that to me is what life is."
Galas has had her share of suffering, including the loss of her brother
to AIDS and her own struggle with hepatitis C. "I've dedicated my life
to telling the truth about the things I see," she says. "What is
considered the dark side for many people is just life. Everyone knows
someone with Alzheimer's or someone with cancer. . . . If I were to
pretend that these things weren't happening, that would be rigorous.
But to sing about such experiences and make them a transformative thing,
that makes your life transcendent."
Her own transcendence comes, in part, from producing an incredible range
of sounds that would readily destroy the untrained voice. Such sounds
wake her up and move her out of depression. To sing long phrases, she
learned circular breathing and initiating sound not from the vocal
cords, but from the skull. "You keep pushing breath through that
resonance area and then you're home free," she explains.
Singular talent like hers is easily misunderstood and rarely supported.
"Anyone trying to go out and do anything really great has to do a lot of
work on thier own," she says. "[The industry] is more interested in
creating trends. ... The big music magazines pimp little girls who don't
know how to sing, who don't know how to do anything except wear slips.
Yet there [are] so many talented women out there nobody knows about.
Galas' performance here in 1994 sent many with sensitive eardrums out
the door; that difficulty has been remedied by scheduling the concert in
the Virginia Museum's theater, not in the acoustically poor auditorium.
Auditory considerations in check, fear not her dark image. Galas
actually cherishes her Richmond audience; she remembers fondly being
unable to finish a song during her last local performance because the
audience's laugher broke her up. "I lectured the audience," she says.
"I said this is a very important song and you destroyed it and I can't
possibly sing it now and I hope you feel better. I adored them."
Adoration notwithstanding, you may want to bring some cotton for your
ears, just in case.
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