Profile of Diamanda Galas on Famous Like Me

Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955) is an American-born avant-garde performance artist, vocalist, and composer. Her parents are Greek Orthodox. Galás was born and raised in San Diego, California. She is known for her distinctive, operatic voice, which has an impressive range, and has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror" . Galas often shrieks, howls, and seems to imitate glossolalia in her performances. Her works largely concentrate on the topics of suffering, despair, condemnation, injustice and loss of dignity. Critic Robert Conroy has said that she is 'unquestionably one of the greatest singers America has ever produced', and comparisons are frequently made between her and another soprano of Greek origin Maria Callas. She is also a fine pianist and organist.

She worked with avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis and Vinko Globokar who gave her the lead role in his opera Un Jour Comme Une Autre which deals with the death by torture of a Turkish woman. The work was sponsored by Amnesty International. She also contributed her voice of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and also apeared on the motion picture soundtrack.

Her work first garnered widespread repute with the controversial 1991 live recording of the album Plague Mass in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. With it, Galás attacked the Catholic Church for its indifference to AIDS using biblical texts. In the words of Terrorizor Magazine, "The church was made to burn with sound, not fire."

Susan McClary (1991) writes that Galás, "heralds a new moment in the history of musical representation," after describing her thus: "Galás emerged within the post-modern performance art scene in the seventies...protesting...the treatment of victims of the Greek junta, attitudes towards victims of AIDS...Her pieces are constructed from the ululation of traditional Mediterranean keening...whispers, shrieks, and moans."

In 1994, Galás collaborated with Led Zeppelin bass guitarist John Paul Jones. The resultant record, The Sporting Life, while containing much of Galás's trademark vocal gymnastics, is probably the closest she has ever come to rock music.

Galás also performs as a blues artist interpreting a wide range of songs into her unique piano and vocal styles. This aspect of her work is focused on in The Singer, Malediction and Prayer, and La Serpenta Canta. Many of her selections both within and outside of blues repitoir have sometimes been categorized as 'homicidal love songs'. She also focuses on the death penalty. One program of songs, "Frenzy", has been dedicated to Aileen Wuornos and features the work of Phil Ochs's Iron Lady and Hank Williams Sr.'s I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.

A recent work (2003), "Defixiones, Will and Testament", deals with the Turkish genocide of Anatolian Greek, Armenian and Assyrian people. Galàs performs the work in ten different languages.

Her latest song cycle is an interpretation of songs by Édith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich.

Discography:

• Litanies of Satan (1982) - notable for "Wild Women with Steak Knives"
• Faust. Eros. Tod (1982 ?) (live)
• Diamanda Galas (1984)
• Saint of the Pit (1986)
• Divine Punishment (1986)
• You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988)
• Masque of the Red Death (1989)
• Plague Mass (1984 End of the Epidemic) (1991) (live)
• The Singer (1992)
• Vena Cava (1993)
• The Sporting Life (1994), with John Paul Jones
• Schrei X (1996) (live)
• Malediction & Prayer (1998) (live)
• La serpenta canta (2003)
• Defixiones, Will and Testament (2003)

Source

• McClary, Susan (1991). Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, p.110-11. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816618984.

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