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S & H Alternative Music Concert
Diamanda Galas, Defixiones, Will and
Testament, RFH, 17th October 2003 (MB)
"A man’s throat is slit in
Paris, it is called ‘murder’, but when a man’s throat is slit in the
Middle East it’s called a ‘question’." Victor Hugo
The
legendary Diamanda Galas, in her first Festival Hall concert for two
years, easily confirmed her status as one of the most creative and
iconographic musicians around with this, the first UK performance of
Defixiones (with an impeccable audience of Goths, punks, skinheads,
the dispossessed and not-so-dispossessed, left typically mesmerised).
Although markedly less approachable than
La Serpenta Canta,
which I reviewed in September 2001, Defixiones, in its intensity
of language and rawness of expression, recalls her much earlier
Plague Mass, a seminal work in both the Galas and the modern music
canon. With a cerebral directness, and an emotivity that often feels
like walking barefoot through a field of broken, needle-sharp glass,
Defixiones reveals itself to be a toweringly creative work that,
despite taking its subject matter from events that happened almost 90
years ago, has unerring contemporary relevance.
Defixiones is in part an
attempt at catharsis and a broadening out into eternal values of
redemption and hope. Inspired by the events of the ‘minor holocaust’,
more specifically those of the Armenian, Assyrian and the Anatolian and
Pontic Greek genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923, it is not
necessarily a work that is solely generic to that time. No Galas cycle,
however intimate and personal, is ever that straightforward. It is all
too easy to make parallels with other genocides and holocausts and her
use, again, of ‘Todesfuge’, one the starkest and most anguished of her
creations - inspired by the Auschwitz poet Paul Celan – illuminates the
wider dimensions of Defixiones, which in a sweeping arc considers
persecution of religious minorities, homosexuals, writers and other
‘undesirables’. Yet, the intolerance which Galas so nakedly describes –
especially of Imperial dominance – exposes both ancient and contemporary
hatreds as forever being universally present; it is almost impossible
not to consider, even though this piece was premiered in Belgium in
1999, that it is a pacifist’s response to a war that began four years
later in a region torn apart by religious turmoil and imperialist
ambitions.
Defixiones follows many
of Galas’ tested modes of expression. There is the linguistic – this
work alone fuses texts from Armenian, Arabic, Greek, Spanish, French,
German and English; there is the sonic, with that four-octave range used
to astonishing effect and there is the musical with the piano taken
almost to the limits of its range, from the thunderous explosions in the
lower keys to the razor sharp injections in the uppermost ones. But what
made Defixiones more compelling than it might have been was the
use of eyewitness accounts of torture and human sacrifice relayed
through speakers, something which melded the past to the present with
catastrophic realism. Indeed, it was perhaps ‘The Eagle of Tkhuma’, the
apotheosis of the first half of this work, which most vividly exploited
both speakers and light. With Galas now writhing centre stage,
calamitous piano chords are taken up by the speakers in one long
death-like march that searingly laments on the brutality and butchery of
genocide. The maelstrom of sound, with echoes and reverberation pounding
like an invading army, are a mirror to the carrion shrieks and cries of
Galas herself, now bathed in light. The rage and terror that the voice
was able to project often felt like the vocal equivalent of having a
knife slowly ratcheted into the chest. The howls briefly suggested King
Lear, the lowest register often proving more unsettling because of the
despondency Galas was able to achieve, as if reliving the terror before
us.
The first part of this work –
lasting some 45 minutes – is notable for Galas’ eschewing of
sentimentality. Less tied to the piano than she is during the second
part, it is the voice that is forced to carry the weight of her vision,
the gravity of the poems she recites given a greater prominence than is
usual in a Galas concert (where occasionally the pianism can impress
more than the voice). The suffering was indeed palpable and you end the
first half of this work feeling almost adrift, certainly more naked and
vulnerable than when you first came into it. This almost made the
twenty-minute interval a mistake since much of that wracked up anguish,
so slowly built up like a tightening coil, had largely been disseminated
by the time we returned.
And in many ways, Part II did
not quite live up to expectations. True, many of these songs relived the
despair, misery and persecution of the earlier pieces but the
reinventiveness attributed to these past works, or their place in the
overall conception of Defixiones, didn’t always seem logical, not
least because the familiar was being placed beside something radically
different. ‘Birds of Death’, for example, reprised from her AIDS
trilogy, Masque of the Red Death, seemed less compelling in its
middle-eastern rewrite, and ‘Artemis’, part of the same trilogy, seemed
unsettled for the same reason. Yet, it is easy to see why they are in
this cycle. Galas’ philosophical perspective is almost to suggest that
personal suffering is inseparable from universal suffering, that one
does not preclude the exclusion of the other. Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’,
whilst partly broadening the themes of persecution beyond the
literal religious genocides that begin the cycle, also highlight much
wider perspectives on persecution and death that take in sexuality and
unconformity. It might be the case that the first part of this cycle is
the universal declaration of suffering, and part two the intimate
declaration of suffering. ‘Birds of Death’, ‘Artemis’ and ‘Todesfuge’
all allude to Galas’ brother, Philip Dimitri, who died from AIDS, and
was the inspiration for Plague Mass – and so much more of her
work. The intimacy of these songs, and their inclusion here, can be seen
as Galas’ own inversion of what has preceded it, her brother the
omnipresent ghost-like conscience of her own creativity as she is the
guiding principle behind our own consciences, individual and collective.
Yet, Defixiones is not
just a lament for the past and this is why it is such an important work
in Galas’ output. It is an unequivocal reminder, as TS Eliot wrote in
the opening poem, ‘Burnt Norton’, of his Four Quartets, that,
"Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And
time future contained in time past." Defixiones, written by a
woman who is a song writer, poet, musician and philosopher, is a work of
not just our time. It is timeless in what it has to tell us. And her
performance of it here was ample proof that we all need to experience
the scythe of justice and righteousness slice through our conscience to
make us once again human beings capable of accepting, and delivering,
tolerance in every form.
Marc Bridle
Defixiones, Will and Testament will be
released in the UK, by Mute Records, on 24th November 2003.
