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Diamanda Galas: Masque Of The Red Death
Electro-Acoustical Visitation Mass for soprano solo, based upon the Old Testament (Premiere/Commission by Ars Electronica)
"THE DIVINE PUNISHMENT" Virtuosity, emotional engagement, deeply felt expression and convincing electronic manipulation—these are attributes with which the international press has described the musician, composer and actress Diamanda Galas. Peter Frank from "Flash Art" lists Diamanda Galas among the Meta-Musicans, together with avantgarde-figures as glittering as Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno, for they are the ones who manage to stage something like the "total overall Work of Art". And so rock fans as well as avantgarde music lovers rank among her admirers. For Ars Electronica Diamanda Galas will realize the commission opera "MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH" (matching E. A. Poe's story title), an electro-acoustical visitation mass. Starting from the Old Testament, the artist will deal with all kinds of plagues and misfortunes that regularly visit mankind.
Both real-time and playback voices as well as the keyboard instruments are sung and played by Diamanda Galas herself. The Linz Shipyards will render an ambience matching the music. Ars Electronica's commission is furthermore realized with the help of the American "National Endowment For The Arts (Opera/New Music Theatre Program)", "The Kitchen" (New York City) and "Intravenal Sound Operations".
We want to thank the Österreichische Schiffswerften AG Linz-Korneuburg (ÖSWAG—Austrian Shipyard Corp.) for their friendly assistance.Diamanda Galas
INTRAVENAL SONG "This music is concerned with tendencies towards excessive behavior.
An obsession, extremes omnipresent and encroaching upon the other, within microseconds, coalescing one moment and dissolving the next towards an ultimate dissolution, which is the soul's own implosion. You do not go to a hospital to inspire the recreation of your own death onstage. You know it by heart.
This need, this voracity for the extremes of consciousness I return to. An actor may simulate the desired emotive state through a skilled manipulation of external object materials, or he may use the raw materials of his own soul in a process which is the immediate, the direct experience of the emotion itself. This second concern is felt by performers who, not just professional, are obsessional performers."
Except form INTRAVENAL. Song (1982) by Diamanda Galas, San Diego California, published by PERSPECTIVES IN NEW MUSIC, April, 1983, NY.Peter Frank
THE NEW MONODRAMA OF DIAMANDA GALAS As textual continuity disintegrates, narrative is heard (and seen) as a thickly layered palimpsest of moods and meanings.
The last decade has seen the emergence of many multi-talented artists who address themselves in innovative ways to specifically musical concerns. These artists' innovations result as much from their conversance with extramusical forms and ideas as from their involvement with music itself. "Meta-musicians" as diverse in background and mode of expression as Meredith Monk, Yoko Ono, Brian Eno, and Laurie Anderson have secured significant niches for themselves in popular as well as sophisticated tastes.
Diamanda Galas, more recently emerged than the people named above, is trained in many of the "traditional" musical modes, including opera (dramatic and belcanto), classical theory and performance, and prebaroque vocal ornamentation. She also has substantial experience with avantgarde jazz improvisation (in which she made her first, more limited reputation), electronic music, and performance in the visual-art context. Something of all these disciplines can be discerned in Galas's art; her work, however, never seems a pastiche. She combines disciplines in order to achieve not clever eclectic stylization, but visionary intensity appropriate to the subjects that provoke her.
Galas is known as perhaps the most dramatically extreme proponent of new techniques extending the nature and abilities of the human voice. Her vocal extensions build not only on the pioneering work of such singer-performers as Monk and Joan LaBarbara, but on the more purely vocal experiments of such now-legendary avantgarde virtuosi as Cathy Berberian. Galas advances this tradition not just with new techniques, but with new concepts into overarching episodes, grouped occurrences of musical events that reveal added meaning in their proximity to one another. In some compositions these occur in short "movements", in others they establish an uninterrupted flow, but never do they conform to the reiterative, developmental method of traditional thematic elaboration. Nor, for that matter, do they suggest the repetitive modular method made popular by Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Galas's sense of chronologic formulation, although not haphazard, emphasizes discontinuity rather than continuity. As in her treatment of text, Galas fractures her sound material, creating jagged splinters of aural meaning and reassembling those splinters so that, in an almost cubist manner, a new aural presence is synthesized which bristles with the sharp edges of those splinters. This process is rendered intuitively, according to Galas's response to her particular verbal and musical material. A cohesive structure appropriate to the use of the text emerges thereby.
Galas, a San Diego native, studied a wide range of musical forms, as well as visual-art performance, at the branch of the University of California in nearby La Jolla. Post graduate experience in Europe, interpreting the work of other composers (eg Vinko Globokar, Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio), continued Galas on to her development of a solo music-theater. By 1981 she had composed her first mature piece—WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK KNIVES—in what became a series of what German critics have called SCHREI-OPER ('shriek-opera'), referring back to the "shriek-performance" developed in late German expressionist theater. A more appropriate definition might be "monodrama", a term coined by Arnold Schoenberg. From the first, Galas had in mind the musical counterpart to SCHREITHEATER developed by the Viennese composer in works for orchestrally accompanied SPRACHGESANG ('speech song') such as ERWARTUNG and DIE GLÜCKLICHE HAND.
Galas has realized four more works since her first: THE LITANIES OF SATAN: TRAGONTHIA APO TO AIMA EXALIN FONOS (Song from the Blood of Those Murdered); LES YEUX SANS SANG and PANOPTIKON.
The first section of her most ambitious work to date, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, premieres at Ars Electronica. Each monodrama employs very different texts, a varying amount of electronic modification, and changing emphasis between purely musical sound and verbal expression. Although coherent snatches of speech break through frequently, language in Galas's presentations is used less as a vehicle for lingual information per se and more as a powerful but cryptic sonic presence. Vocal and electronic manipulation leaves the texts partly obliterated and greatly distorted, so that narrative continuity disintegrates. No narrative comes across as a simple story: rather, as subject to her interpretation, each is heard (and seen) as a thickly layered palimpsest of moods and meanings.
An often outrageous blasphemy and mock morbidity emerges from Galas's artistic persona, in the work itself and in her quasi-vampiric appearance. Pop-oriented commentators and interviewers especially have alit on her startling mode of presentation, sometimes finding (if only by dint of the Baudelaire title) more than mere intimations of demonism and witchcraft, and Galas has archly played to their simplistic interpretations. There is no denying the genuine passion underpinning her work, however, passion that results in great part from her empathy with desperately heroic and defiant human beings entrapped in dire straits. These beings are defeated, perhaps even bereft of hope. But they cling to their humanity, if to nothing else. Close to destruction as they are, the figures Galas describes and portrays in her monodramas are moving and even powerful in their sense of self and of some inner purpose, even when the dire situations are themselves actually inner states of mind. This theme of individual-against-all (including the self) pervades the literature that eventually gave rise to Schoenberg's monodramas, and it renews itself in Galas's works.
Formally, Galas's pieces follow no preestablished structural formula; each relies on its form to give it its own particular continuity. It is apparent that Galas has found the shape of each piece in the process of conceiving and composing it. What may not be so apparent is that that shape undergoes continual subtle metamorphoses from performance to performance. Galas continually improvises in various parts of her works until those parts, and the works overall, can develop no further. The works do not then enter Galas's "repertory", at least for long; they spawn other pieces. Every performance of every composition is thereby different unless and until it reaches a point of irreducible fixity. It need not even reach that point to be "cannibalized" by Galas for newer pieces. LES YEUX SANS SANG, in fact, grows out of WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK KNIVES. The two works currently have a common text, but the text of the new piece is likely to change—and the piece itself, of course, would change with it. All Galas's compositions are "works in progress".
As such, Galas's body of work is at present designed to disappear with her—unless she chooses to formalize her pieces and teach her methods. Even if she does not, however, Galas could well prove a formidable influence on the evolution of time-based art. Her amplification of extended vocal techniques into full-scale monodramas is itself a marked innovation. She has developed the collage techniques, body-resonance explorations, new means of breathing, and sound-poetry texts normally associated with the extended-vocals genre into what she calls an "electro-acoustic theater whose nucleus is the voice of the actor".
Galas's "electro-acoustic theater" works include a striking visual component. A complex sequence of stage lighting cues forms an integral part of her scorings. The constantly shifting washes of color vividly enhance the hallucinatory intensity of the sounds she produces, the texts embedded in those sounds, and her very stage presence, a presence at once gaunt and vast, alluring and forbidding. Galas is quite evidently something of a throwback, not only to the violent passions of the expressionists, but to the exorbitant visionary decadence of the symbolist artists as well. Her self-consuming FEMME FATALE image also recalls symbolist imagery and thought, as does her blend of sonic, theatrical, and visual media into ambitious attempts at GESAMTKUNSTWERK. Her exploitation of projected light recalls the experiments in sound and color of symbolist and postsymbolist artists and musicians.
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