Anguish and anger have long been central components of Diamanda Galas's works for shrieking, caterwauling voice and electronic sound. But few works by Ms. Galas that this listener has encountered have been so directly and intensely focused as her "Masque of the Red Death," a work about society's responses to AIDS.

Ms. Galas gave the 70-minute score its American premiere on Tuesday evening at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center's Serious Fun series. More than most of this contemporary music festival's offerings, Ms. Galas's piece pointed up the trivialization implicit in the series' name, which hangs awkwardly over so stark and searing a work.

Ms. Galas composed the work between 1984 and 1988 using biblical excerpts, poetry by Gerard Nerval and her won texts, augmented by her pained, virtuosic screaming and an insistent electronic soundtrack. These elements coalesce into a powerful and unrelenting indictment of people who regard AIDS as divine retribution, those who shun the dying and those who, in Ms. Galas's view, do little to fight the disease.

There is a personal undercurrent in the work: Ms. Galas's brother was sound to have AIDS while she was composing the piece.

Ms. Galas sets the mood quickly with a babbling mass of chanting voices as dry-ice vapors fill the stage in purple light. The cloud poured over the audience as Ms. Galas, dressed in black, with feline makeup and her hair pulled taut, stepped to the microphone to begin her rapid-fire keening.

Her vocal technique embodies elements from several musical world. As a basis, there are the warbling pyrotechnics in which Yoko Ono indulged in the late 1960's and which have been expanded on by the B-52's rock band and Meredith Monk. There is also a purely operatic component. Sections of "Masque" are sung in clear timbres, solidly supported. One hears Greek, Middle Eastern and Oriental influences, too.

More than any of her predecessors, Ms. Galas molds these techniques into an expansive but cohesive vocabulary. She also makes the most of technology: much of the time her voice is channeled through digital delays and other sound-modification devices that expand her range of colors and effects and in this case heighten the sense of horror her listeners share

The voices on the electronic tape are hers, too, and the sound is hellish and demonic, particularly when she is reciting certain biblical texts – for example, "The Law of the Plague" from Leviticus. Later, Ms. Galas adopts the personal of a Christian fundamentalist, with the full range of typical mannerisms (from Southern accent to phrase repetition), to accuse society of turning AIDS into a form of politically motivated homicide.

The electronic score that accompanies Ms. Galas's live vocal performance is a compelling, gripping backdrop. Ms. Galas uses drones, drum beats that are both pounding and piercing, and eerie harmonic clusters to create a dark, terrifying atmosphere that evaporates only at the end of the work.

As a finale, Ms. Galas accompanies herself on the piano in a huskily sung, pointed revision of the spiritual "Let My People Go," and in an emphatic setting of "Le Treizieme Revient" by Gerard Nerval. The Nerval text, which Ms Galas sang in French, ends with the invocation to which this painful work builds: "If you are a man (and not a coward) you will grasp the hand of him denied by mercy, until his breath becomes your own."