back	schrei x reviews
	Diamanda Galás P.S. 122 New York City, NY January 11, 13, 18, 20, 1996 by Micah Fink Review History Previous work Diamanda Galás is a maelstrom of sound, music and emotion. Last Thursday night she mesmerized a sold-out audience at PS 122 with a scorching forty-minute performance of SCHREI X, her newest acoustic work dealing with the emotional terrain of madness, dementia, rape and imprisonment. SCHREI X, which means shriek in German, was performed in complete darkness. Galás appeared on stage like a silent wraith and then burst into a startling series of piercing, guttural screams that lashed the audience with hurricane force. The audience recoiled from the amplified blasts: some flinched, others twitched, most sat stony in their seats, amazed by the raw emotional impact of this extended aria of pain. This is art. Galás has learned to make music that conveys the emotions of the victims of disease and crime, unmediated by the fuzzy softening veil of beautified sound. Galás' music bears the actual hammer blows of experience. This is not soothing music for the bashful, the shy, or the soulless pleasure seeker. The work is composed of ten sections; each giving voice to a different demon. In section two Galás' voice plunged low with rumbling sobs wracked with terror and grief. She chanted in Latin in Section three and appeared to be speaking in tongues in section seven. Throughout the work she evoked the emotional presence of dozens of distinct characters, including a tormented child, a raped victim on the edge of madness, a psychotic man howling in a cell on death row. Time loses its meaning in the dark. The final section, a return to the relentless rending cries of the first, ended as quickly as the performance had begun. Galás hurried off stage in the dark, and refused to be lured except briefly back on to the stage despite a thumping ten minute ovation. "I have to use visual analogies to explain my work to people, because people don't really know how to listen," Galás says, sitting in a Polish coffee shop in the East Village. "Think of a canvas with a thousand brilliant colors covered over with black. In this piece, I'm etching my work out of the darkness." Darkness, in many ways, is Galás' natural element. She is legally blind. Her vision is 23,000/ 2,500, and she needs inch-thick lenses to read a newspaper. "When you are sitting in the dark," she says, "there are no distractions, there is no escape, and you are forced to confront the physical reality of sound." "A lot of my work has been about the concept of a person caged, treated like an animal, and escaping through insanity," Galás says, drinking the third of what will be five cups of black coffee. "This interests me because I'm that kind of person. I'm very obsessive. SCHREI is a very personal piece. I've spent a lot of time trying not to live obsessively, but some years back I had to check myself into an institution to deal with extreme depression and paranoia. I ended up sitting in the middle of my apartment with a lot of trash, unable to move." "It's been years and years since I was in the institution and everyone I work with deals with it," she says. "I'm always asking lots of questions, like 'why did you say that,' and 'what made you say that.' There is a certain degree of that shit that functions well for me. When the doctor asks why I wake up in the middle of the night and check the lock on the door five times, I say it's because I live in New York City. It's become functional." "I'm not a performance artist," she says, rejecting the idea that her work is just some form of therapy. "I don't refer to my own experiences all the time." Her art is motivated by her perception that sound supersedes language and that music has precise emotional impact which is as real as the rest of the forces of the physical world. The multitude of voices that emerge in her work are either "the voices a person hears as they are being forced to confession by physical and chemical means," Galás explains, or "a multitude of voices taking place within one person, who is a self-tormentor." The difference is not so important, she says, because the key to SCHREI is her perception that insanity and imprisonment are similar experiences, because they both involve the absence of meaningful dialogue. "In prison, you don't have space, so you have to invent it," Galás says. "You create a dialogue with imaginary beings. You need dialogue. That's also what happens when people become schizophrenic. They start talking to themselves to provide themselves with the dialogue they are not getting in real life." II. Diamanda was born into a musical Greek family in San Diego on August 29, 1955. Her father, who emigrated from Greece as a child, was descended from a long line of cantors in the Orthodox church, and while she was growing up he played the bass and the trombone, directed a gospel choir at the college where he taught Greek and English literature, and headed a jazz band called Jim and the Flames. Diamanda began studying piano at the age of five and debuted with the San Diego Philharmonic at the age of 14. She also played with her father's band in bars and American Legion halls. Despite all this jazz, Diamanda says that her upbringing was very strict. She and Philip-Dimitri, her brother, were not allowed to bring friends home, and her father absolutely forbade her to sing in the house. "He didn't want the singer's life for me," she says. "He wanted me to know the piano. He said if you know the piano, you know the orchestra. So I didn't sing because I didn't want him to criticize me." She was liberated from the strict environment of her parent's home when she began studying biochemistry at the University of California at San Diego. This freedom was a mixed blessing. It was the early seventies and in a confusing jumble of school, drugs, music, and sex she earned her degree, ended up addicted to speed, shooting heroin, and walking the streets picking up tricks. When asked about this period Galás shrugs and says it taught her more about life than she ever knew. She began singing while tripping on LSD in a sealed isolation tank. "I didn't want anyone else to hear me," she says. "Unheard, therefore uncensored. I wanted the complete freedom to make as much noise as I wanted without people freaking out." She was playing piano with jazz bands and began to feel that the voice was "the most powerful instrument in terms of emotional nuance." Inspired, she decided to give up the piano and explore the power of her voice. "The voice transforms thoughts into sounds, and thought into message," she says. "It is primary." Her conviction has yielded impressive results. Her fans are an eclectic group who can barely keep pace as she skips across musical genres. Punk, jazz, blues, gospel, heavy metal, classical opera, a rock tour with John Paul Jones, the former bass-player for Led Zeplin. Galás is a diva in the classical sense. She expects the world's attention and admiration for everything she pleases to sing and more often than not, she gets it. "When people hear her perform live," says John Killacky, the chief music curator of the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, "they learn what the human voice is capable of doing." Her soprano voice has a natural range of three and a half octaves, more than twice the range of most opera singers. But it is the way she uses her voice to tear open the world that makes Galás "seminal," Killacky says, "and one of the most influential artists in the New Music scene." Popular singers like P.J. Harvey, Shelley Hirsch, and Meredith Monk acknowledge her influence on their musical sensibilities, and the list of people who have asked her to collaborate includes John Paul Jones, Jerome Robbins, Steven Sondheim, David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, and Trent Resner, the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, who used her voice in the sound track for Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers. "She's like no one else we carry," says Jennifer Gross, a publicist at Mute Records, which has released ten albums by Galás since 1983. "We may not make a lot of money off her work, but we carry her because we believe in her and are doing it to support her art." "A first rate operatic sound. Absolutely glorious," says Barbara Maier, a voice trainer who works with Diamanda in New York City. "There is a wildness to her sound that is very exciting. It has a hard edge, with a lot of brilliance and shimmer. She has a higher range than a Southerland with about the same weight of voice, but with a much stronger timbre. If she was singing at the Met she'd be doing Verdi's roles, the Verdi Butterflies, but with her flexibility she can also do Donizetti and Bellini. " Maier says her first encounters with Diamanda were unsettling when they began working together in 1990. "What she was doing was totally beyond anything I'd ever experienced," says Maier, who has worked with opera and pop singers for the last twenty years, and once sang with the New York City Opera. "I had no idea how she was making these sounds. I still don't really understand it exactly, but she is able to make more than one pitch at the same time, and in a sense, sing a duet with herself. She also brings operatic quality to her sound. She takes it and reshapes it. The operatic core is still there, but it's changed. As you go higher, in operatic sound, the word is not as important as the sound itself and the vowels modify, they tend to become very spacey, but she is able to keep the vowels compressed, and that's why it some times sounds like a scream. But it is not a scream. If she were to do a full out scream, for as long, or as loud, she would be in danger of bursting a blood vessel or at the very least damaging the chords. She uses a very controlled breath, along with the freedom of her larynx, to create the same kind of feeling as a sustained operatic high note. Because of her vision and creativity, she has found ways to use her voice that are far outside the operatic sounds that we expect and far outside the range of what traditionally trained people do." III. Galás first toured through Europe in 1979, where she performed two of her first solo pieces, WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK KNIVES and SONG FROM THE BLOOD OF THE MURDERED . She was well received and also appeared in the lead role of an opera UN JOUR COMME UNE AUTRE by French composer Vinko Globokar. Galás returned from Europe in 1981 and settled in New York City. Her first performances were held for the inmates at the Gennessee Mental Health Institution, an insane asylum in upstate New York. She also performed her work at The Kitchen and other performance spaces around New York City. In 1984 she received a small grant, and began developing the idea for PLAGUE MASS, a solo performance created as a requiem for people dying from AIDS. While she was working on the piece her brother, Philip-Dimitri, was diagnosed with AIDS. He died two years later in 1986. "There is a classical tradition of the requiem that includes Mozart, Berlioz, Panderetski and Xenakis," says Galás. "If I were a painter or sculptor, my work would be more acceptable, but for some reason dealing with these themes in music is considered morbid." Death, insanity, imprisonment, AIDS, and dementia are the themes she has explored in the work she has produced since 1984, including PLAGUE MASS, JUDGMENT DAY, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, VENA CAVA, INSECKTA and SCHREI. The response has been wildly divergent. She's been called the "Mike Tyson of voice," and "a demonic diva," and been denounced as "a terrorist," "a Satanist," and "a witch." Sections of her video DOUBLE BARRELED PRAYER were shown on the Christian Broadcasting Network by Pat Robertson to illustrate the premise that rock music is a tool of the devil. Carl Heyward, reviewing JUDGMENT DAY for Art Week in 1992, described the experience as "church-like," while a performance of PLAGUE MASS in Italy in 1990 was soundly condemned as "blasphemous and sacrilegious" by members of the Italian government and the Catholic Church. The reality that Galás is attempting to expose is not easy to hear. It is certainly not relaxing. But Galás is dealing with the world as she knows it. A world that includes joy and passion as well as death, prisons, insane asylums, AIDS and the bleakness of depression, obsession and despair. "I think my stuff is beautiful," Galás says. "When you are creating something, you don't think 'now I'm going to make an ugly sound and now I'm going to make a beautiful sound.' Would you call Picasso's work 'ugly?' He was drawing what he saw." "Music which is truly meaningful," she says, "is a distillation of reality, and that's usually tragedy. At best, pop music lightly touches on tragedy in ways people can relate to, shed tears to, maybe even dance to, after which they can go home, go to sleep, and effectively dismiss it. My work does not describe anything. It is the thing itself. It is the actual sound of the emotions involved." By refusing to censor the wildness in her own voice, Galás has broken through the fragile barrier between art and life. Now she is daring the world to follow her through the breach. Photo: Diamanda Galás by Dona Ann McAdams Copyright © 1995-8 Dance Online, Inc.

back

schrei x reviews

Diamanda Galás

P.S. 122

New York City, NY

January 11, 13, 18, 20, 1996

by Micah Fink

Review
History
Previous work

Diamanda Galás is a maelstrom of sound, music and emotion.

Last Thursday night she mesmerized a sold-out audience at PS 122 with a scorching forty-minute performance of SCHREI X, her newest acoustic work dealing with the emotional terrain of madness, dementia, rape and imprisonment.

SCHREI X, which means shriek in German, was performed in complete darkness. Galás appeared on stage like a silent wraith and then burst into a startling series of piercing, guttural screams that lashed the audience with hurricane force. The audience recoiled from the amplified blasts: some flinched, others twitched, most sat stony in their seats, amazed by the raw emotional impact of this extended aria of pain.

This is art. Galás has learned to make music that conveys the emotions of the victims of disease and crime, unmediated by the fuzzy softening veil of beautified sound. Galás' music bears the actual hammer blows of experience. This is not soothing music for the bashful, the shy, or the soulless pleasure seeker.

The work is composed of ten sections; each giving voice to a different demon. In section two Galás' voice plunged low with rumbling sobs wracked with terror and grief. She chanted in Latin in Section three and appeared to be speaking in tongues in section seven. Throughout the work she evoked the emotional presence of dozens of distinct characters, including a tormented child, a raped victim on the edge of madness, a psychotic man howling in a cell on death row.

Time loses its meaning in the dark. The final section, a return to the relentless rending cries of the first, ended as quickly as the performance had begun. Galás hurried off stage in the dark, and refused to be lured except briefly back on to the stage despite a thumping ten minute ovation.

"I have to use visual analogies to explain my work to people, because people don't really know how to listen," Galás says, sitting in a Polish coffee shop in the East Village. "Think of a canvas with a thousand brilliant colors covered over with black. In this piece, I'm etching my work out of the darkness."

Darkness, in many ways, is Galás' natural element. She is legally blind. Her vision is 23,000/ 2,500, and she needs inch-thick lenses to read a newspaper. "When you are sitting in the dark," she says, "there are no distractions, there is no escape, and you are forced to confront the physical reality of sound."

"A lot of my work has been about the concept of a person caged, treated like an animal, and escaping through insanity," Galás says, drinking the third of what will be five cups of black coffee. "This interests me because I'm that kind of person. I'm very obsessive. SCHREI is a very personal piece. I've spent a lot of time trying not to live obsessively, but some years back I had to check myself into an institution to deal with extreme depression and paranoia. I ended up sitting in the middle of my apartment with a lot of trash, unable to move."

"It's been years and years since I was in the institution and everyone I work with deals with it," she says. "I'm always asking lots of questions, like 'why did you say that,' and 'what made you say that.' There is a certain degree of that shit that functions well for me. When the doctor asks why I wake up in the middle of the night and check the lock on the door five times, I say it's because I live in New York City. It's become functional."

"I'm not a performance artist," she says, rejecting the idea that her work is just some form of therapy. "I don't refer to my own experiences all the time." Her art is motivated by her perception that sound supersedes language and that music has precise emotional impact which is as real as the rest of the forces of the physical world. The multitude of voices that emerge in her work are either "the voices a person hears as they are being forced to confession by physical and chemical means," Galás explains, or "a multitude of voices taking place within one person, who is a self-tormentor." The difference is not so important, she says, because the key to SCHREI is her perception that insanity and imprisonment are similar experiences, because they both involve the absence of meaningful dialogue. "In prison, you don't have space, so you have to invent it," Galás says. "You create a dialogue with imaginary beings. You need dialogue. That's also what happens when people become schizophrenic. They start talking to themselves to provide themselves with the dialogue they are not getting in real life."

II.

Diamanda was born into a musical Greek family in San Diego on August 29, 1955. Her father, who emigrated from Greece as a child, was descended from a long line of cantors in the Orthodox church, and while she was growing up he played the bass and the trombone, directed a gospel choir at the college where he taught Greek and English literature, and headed a jazz band called Jim and the Flames. Diamanda began studying piano at the age of five and debuted with the San Diego Philharmonic at the age of 14. She also played with her father's band in bars and American Legion halls. Despite all this jazz, Diamanda says that her upbringing was very strict. She and Philip-Dimitri, her brother, were not allowed to bring friends home, and her father absolutely forbade her to sing in the house. "He didn't want the singer's life for me," she says. "He wanted me to know the piano. He said if you know the piano, you know the orchestra. So I didn't sing because I didn't want him to criticize me."

She was liberated from the strict environment of her parent's home when she began studying biochemistry at the University of California at San Diego. This freedom was a mixed blessing. It was the early seventies and in a confusing jumble of school, drugs, music, and sex she earned her degree, ended up addicted to speed, shooting heroin, and walking the streets picking up tricks. When asked about this period Galás shrugs and says it taught her more about life than she ever knew.

She began singing while tripping on LSD in a sealed isolation tank. "I didn't want anyone else to hear me," she says. "Unheard, therefore uncensored. I wanted the complete freedom to make as much noise as I wanted without people freaking out." She was playing piano with jazz bands and began to feel that the voice was "the most powerful instrument in terms of emotional nuance." Inspired, she decided to give up the piano and explore the power of her voice. "The voice transforms thoughts into sounds, and thought into message," she says. "It is primary." Her conviction has yielded impressive results.

Her fans are an eclectic group who can barely keep pace as she skips across musical genres. Punk, jazz, blues, gospel, heavy metal, classical opera, a rock tour with John Paul Jones, the former bass-player for Led Zeplin. Galás is a diva in the classical sense. She expects the world's attention and admiration for everything she pleases to sing and more often than not, she gets it.

"When people hear her perform live," says John Killacky, the chief music curator of the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, "they learn what the human voice is capable of doing." Her soprano voice has a natural range of three and a half octaves, more than twice the range of most opera singers. But it is the way she uses her voice to tear open the world that makes Galás "seminal," Killacky says, "and one of the most influential artists in the New Music scene." Popular singers like P.J. Harvey, Shelley Hirsch, and Meredith Monk acknowledge her influence on their musical sensibilities, and the list of people who have asked her to collaborate includes John Paul Jones, Jerome Robbins, Steven Sondheim, David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, and Trent Resner, the lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, who used her voice in the sound track for Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers. "She's like no one else we carry," says Jennifer Gross, a publicist at Mute Records, which has released ten albums by Galás since 1983. "We may not make a lot of money off her work, but we carry her because we believe in her and are doing it to support her art."

"A first rate operatic sound. Absolutely glorious," says Barbara Maier, a voice trainer who works with Diamanda in New York City. "There is a wildness to her sound that is very exciting. It has a hard edge, with a lot of brilliance and shimmer. She has a higher range than a Southerland with about the same weight of voice, but with a much stronger timbre. If she was singing at the Met she'd be doing Verdi's roles, the Verdi Butterflies, but with her flexibility she can also do Donizetti and Bellini. "

Maier says her first encounters with Diamanda were unsettling when they began working together in 1990. "What she was doing was totally beyond anything I'd ever experienced," says Maier, who has worked with opera and pop singers for the last twenty years, and once sang with the New York City Opera. "I had no idea how she was making these sounds. I still don't really understand it exactly, but she is able to make more than one pitch at the same time, and in a sense, sing a duet with herself. She also brings operatic quality to her sound. She takes it and reshapes it. The operatic core is still there, but it's changed. As you go higher, in operatic sound, the word is not as important as the sound itself and the vowels modify, they tend to become very spacey, but she is able to keep the vowels compressed, and that's why it some times sounds like a scream. But it is not a scream. If she were to do a full out scream, for as long, or as loud, she would be in danger of bursting a blood vessel or at the very least damaging the chords. She uses a very controlled breath, along with the freedom of her larynx, to create the same kind of feeling as a sustained operatic high note. Because of her vision and creativity, she has found ways to use her voice that are far outside the operatic sounds that we expect and far outside the range of what traditionally trained people do."

III.

Galás first toured through Europe in 1979, where she performed two of her first solo pieces, WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK KNIVES and SONG FROM THE BLOOD OF THE MURDERED . She was well received and also appeared in the lead role of an opera UN JOUR COMME UNE AUTRE by French composer Vinko Globokar. Galás returned from Europe in 1981 and settled in New York City. Her first performances were held for the inmates at the Gennessee Mental Health Institution, an insane asylum in upstate New York. She also performed her work at The Kitchen and other performance spaces around New York City. In 1984 she received a small grant, and began developing the idea for PLAGUE MASS, a solo performance created as a requiem for people dying from AIDS. While she was working on the piece her brother, Philip-Dimitri, was diagnosed with AIDS. He died two years later in 1986. "There is a classical tradition of the requiem that includes Mozart, Berlioz, Panderetski and Xenakis," says Galás. "If I were a painter or sculptor, my work would be more acceptable, but for some reason dealing with these themes in music is considered morbid."

Death, insanity, imprisonment, AIDS, and dementia are the themes she has explored in the work she has produced since 1984, including PLAGUE MASS, JUDGMENT DAY, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, VENA CAVA, INSECKTA and SCHREI. The response has been wildly divergent. She's been called the "Mike Tyson of voice," and "a demonic diva," and been denounced as "a terrorist," "a Satanist," and "a witch." Sections of her video DOUBLE BARRELED PRAYER were shown on the Christian Broadcasting Network by Pat Robertson to illustrate the premise that rock music is a tool of the devil. Carl Heyward, reviewing JUDGMENT DAY for Art Week in 1992, described the experience as "church-like," while a performance of PLAGUE MASS in Italy in 1990 was soundly condemned as "blasphemous and sacrilegious" by members of the Italian government and the Catholic Church.

The reality that Galás is attempting to expose is not easy to hear. It is certainly not relaxing. But Galás is dealing with the world as she knows it. A world that includes joy and passion as well as death, prisons, insane asylums, AIDS and the bleakness of depression, obsession and despair.

"I think my stuff is beautiful," Galás says. "When you are creating something, you don't think 'now I'm going to make an ugly sound and now I'm going to make a beautiful sound.' Would you call Picasso's work 'ugly?' He was drawing what he saw."

"Music which is truly meaningful," she says, "is a distillation of reality, and that's usually tragedy. At best, pop music lightly touches on tragedy in ways people can relate to, shed tears to, maybe even dance to, after which they can go home, go to sleep, and effectively dismiss it. My work does not describe anything. It is the thing itself. It is the actual sound of the emotions involved." By refusing to censor the wildness in her own voice, Galás has broken through the fragile barrier between art and life. Now she is daring the world to follow her through the breach.

Photo: Diamanda Galás by Dona Ann McAdams