EDWARDBATCHELDER.COM
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Diamanda Galas
Open
Ears Festival, Kitchener, Ontario, 4-30-05
"What
is this love for bones and dirt," asks Diamanda Galas near the
end of Defixiones: Will and Testament, her latest work of
catharsis and mourning. It's a question that might be asked of any of
her pieces, for few modern composers have been so relentlessly committed
to recalling – in all senses of the word – the forgotten dead of the
last century's catastrophes. Within Defixiones, however, the
question attains a particular resonance.
Dedicated to the "forgotten and erased" Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks
who perished amid the violent death throes of the Ottoman Empire nearly
a hundred years ago, Defixiones is one of Galas's most personal
pieces, with its origins, she has said, in stories told to her by her
father. At the same time, her instincts as a musician are so
wide-ranging that the piece becomes more than a personal vendetta
(though it is certainly that, too); it rises up into a long liturgical
lament for all the cultures that existed and co-existed – however
uneasily – in the Eastern Mediterranean at that historical moment.
In
its hauntingly beautiful recorded version, Defixiones starts with
a long, keening cry that evolves into an Armenian mass, and from there
encompasses reported testimony of atrocities, Turkish love songs,
Assyrian children's choirs, and a long strident litany of argumentation
that contains the above quotation. Making full use of tape loops and
voice processing, the piece also moves through at least eight languages
in addition to English – Armenian, Arabic, Assyrian, French, Greek,
Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. It's a remarkable polyphony of voices
circling around the central theme of physical loss and spiritual
desolation.
In
its performance in a small church as part of the Open Ears Festival,
Defixiones had evolved again, this time to re-encompass its origins
by being framed by Greek poems in translation. It also gained
immeasurably from Galas's feeling for understated theatrics.
On a
stage lit primarily by candles, beneath an enormous cross, Galas
appeared in a long black dress, hair hidden beneath a dark flowing shawl
that gave her a gaunt, skull-like visage. From a mic stand on the right
of the stage, she began with a Yannis Ritsos poem about the need to
guard the dead. From there, the piece segued into the Armenian mass,
while Galas drifted like a specter to the grand piano center stage,
producing a rumbling in the lower registers before drifting back to the
mic stand to spit out a guttural, multi-lingual tirade broken by long
moans (extended and overdubbed on voice processor by Blaise Depuy) mixed
with staccato yelps and whoops. With the addition of whistling wind
noises, it did indeed sound like a convocation of the angry dead. From
there it was back to the piano for a lilting song of homesickness, the
Turkish love song, and a newly inserted, violently anti-Greek poem in
Turkish called "Hate."
This
was the rhythm for most of the piece – the shrouded Galas moving from
the piano to the microphones, and the music moving from
heart-wrenchingly lovely melodies to whirling spasms of angry noise.
Galas's remarkable three-and-a-half-octave voice has only gained in
power over the years, and increased its ability to channel spirits in
the eeriest possible fashion. "Holokaftoma," in particular, which
occupies the center of Defixiones, features Galas's voice casting
out epithets against a background of recorded voices and sustained piano
chords, climaxing in a terrifying call and response between Galas's
guttural moans and backwashes of high-pitched shrieking.
By
the end of the concert, she ended up in center stage, backlit and
gesturing with her hands while the looped music raged around her before
finally closing with a more subdued reading of several George Seferis
poems, also about death and the dead.
Galas
is a remarkable and unique talent, melding a vision darker than any
punk's with classical vocal and piano technique and an embrace of
electronics worthy of Hendrix. Defixiones, pulling from both her
own personal history and the rich history of Asia Minor, is undoubtedly
her strongest work yet – a dark but moving collision of voices,
languages, and cultures. Her tour of the piece last fall was cancelled
for technical reasons, but there will be two performances of it on
September 8 & 10 in Manhattan as part of the 2005 What Comes After:
Cities, Art, and Recovery International Summit.
Galas
has long been popular in Europe; perhaps, as this nation begins to come
to grips with catastrophes of its own, she may find the American
audience that she deserves.
©
Edward Batchelder
(from
Signal to Noise: The Journal of Improvised and Experimental Music)
