E-Mail This Article to a Friend Historical notes Diamanda Galás prepares to perform a new Defixiones BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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Diamanda Galás has had a talent for plucking beauty from the maw of horror for more than 20 years — right from her first solo recording, 1984’s Diamanda Galás (Metalanguage), which explored the psychology of imprisonment in "Panoptikon" and commemorated those killed by the 1967-’74 Greek junta in "Tragouthia apo to aima exoun phonos," which translates as "Song from the Blood of Those Murdered." But her latest concert work, the Mass Defixiones: Will and Testament — Orders from the Dead, which gets its East Coast debut at New York City’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University in performances September 8 and 10, is her most harrowing opus.

That’s saying a lot, since performances of Insekta found her suspended over the stage in a cage like a laboratory animal, Plague Mass explored the AIDS pandemic, and Vena Cava was a painfully literal representation of organic dementia spun from Galás’s incendiary vocal technique and her experience with the ill and dying.

But there’s a passage in the first movement of Defixiones that’s a peek into the blackest heart of man. As Galás intones what sounds like a Christian liturgical melody crossed with a muezzin’s call, she sings of a group of women who are raped, stripped, and forced to dance in a circle as they’re whipped by soldiers, who eventually tire of the vile amusement and set them afire with kerosene. "I slammed my shutters," declares the passage’s narrator, who has watched from a window, "and asked, ‘How can I dig out my eyes?’ " Later the same section of Defixiones, which draws on the poetry of Ali Ahmad Said (who writes under the pseudonym Adonis) and other Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian writers, recounts a forced march into the desert, where troops dismember the marchers.

The story evolves into a tale of remembrance and honor of the victims of the genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, and Anatolian and Pontic Greeks that Turks carried out from 1914 to 1923 — atrocities that the Turkish government has denied. "Most of my work has been about social justice," Galás says over the phone from her New York City apartment, "but Defixiones is especially important to me because my father is a Greek from Smyrna, so I’ve heard stories of the genocides since I was growing up."

For Galás, the 75-minute performance is emotionally and physically demanding, with some of her most rhythmic and powerful vocalizing and a darkly exploratory and textural piano approach that requires sharp improvisational abilities. It’s also become quite different from the 2003 Mute Records double-CD version of Defixiones, which has even more demanding piano-based numbers that tap all her jazz-bred dexterity plus the country blues standard "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," which closes the recording. She explains, "I had to extract the pieces that were in song form from the work, which is really more of a mass or opera, because I felt they weren’t in keeping with the character of the rest of the piece, which draws on different languages and poetic texts and historical accounts. They’ve become part of a song-based performance called ‘Guilty, Guilty, Guilty’ that I’ll be performing in Australia in October."

Even as her command of longer, conceptual works has grown more masterful, Galás has continued to explore short songs, taking tunes by Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, the Supremes, and others and stretching them with her three-and-a-half-octave range in all directions. Through deft, dark turns and sudden firebombs of vocal expression, she gives their time-tested stories of loss, spiritual disconnection, and retribution a contemporary sensibility.

And, as with her long-form pieces, she’s always tinkering with her song-based programs too. "You know how it is when you love music. You just can’t stop, and you won’t listen if anybody tells you to. There’s always something out there beckoning."

Her musical career began in the 1970s on the West Coast, where she played jazz piano with saxophonist David Murray and began performing with a circle of improvisers that included guitarist Henry Kaiser. She transposed the freedom she’d earned on the keyboard to her voice, an astonishing instrument with a staggering palette of tones and emotional colors. By the time she began making her own albums, Galás was working with multiple microphones and an array of delays, choruses, and other electronic effects. And though she’s recorded and performed with other musicians since establishing herself — notably on a 1994 tour and Mute-label album The Sporting Life with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones — her piano and her voice remain her musical bedrock.

If you’re wondering why Galás isn’t performing Defixiones in Boston, it’s because of a foul-up she experienced at the hands of a now-estranged booking agent last year that caused her planned 2004 tour to be cancelled. Music-business politics appears to have kept the local date from being rescheduled here, where Galás has a large, loyal base of fans. "I was really disappointed about letting my fans down and it crippled me financially, but that guy" — whom she prefers not to name — "is a motherfucker and he needs to be reckoned with, and I’m going to do it." She’s seeking an attorney.

Although Defixiones was completed, at least in its original version, in 1999, the work has taken on additional resonance. Its passages about building walls, literal and metaphorical, as a result of terror echo the Bush administration’s isolationist attitudes, and a poem about the invasion of Beirut draws a direct line from a century ago to the present. There’s also the significance of September, the month in 1922 when Greeks in Smyrna were massacred as sailors aboard British warships looked on, the month in 1955 when the last large upsurge in Turkish violence against Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians took place, and, of course, the month of our own September 11.

"Maybe making connections like that can help Americans understand that other cultures have had to endure even more terrible experiences and help us all understand that every ethnicity shares these common, horrible experiences," Galás observes, "whether you’re in Rwanda or Smyrna or New York."

Diamanda Galás | Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, 3 Spruce St, Manhattan | September 8 + 10 at 8 pm | 212.279.4200