Diamanda Galas
INTERVIEW BY GRACIE & ZARKOV

Diamanda Galas is a must-see performer. We have seen dozens of live
opera performances, and know that her considerable talents could
have been a welcome addition to the world's opera houses. Instead,
she staked out for her personal artistic domain the bleak territory of
madness, isolation and despair. Her unique vocal style combines
operatic technique with melisimatic screams and ululating glossalalia.

She has developed her art through the kind of discipline and practice
that is standard in the classical music tradition, but which is rarely
appreciated by other listeners. Yet her most loyal audience is drawn
from the punks, avant-gardniques, and consumers of "Performance
Art." She is emotionally too strong for the wimp classical
establishment. 

Her distinctive gift is to communicate the terror of isolation: in prison,
in mental wards, or in social isolation, as may happen to people with
AIDS. Within a society that can ostracize such people without sending
them away, her performances relentlessly batter these invisible walls
of social isolation. That frightens people.

Much of her work uses dense, realtime electronic manipulation of her
voice through taped and reverb/delay effects. In her latest work, The
Singer, she simply accompanies her singing at the piano. The impact
of her live performance is literally stunning. Her extreme technique
will inevitably take its toll on her voice. See her perform now while
you still have the chance.

0                                   -Gracie & Zarkov

MONDO 2000: Your new album, The Singer, is different from what
you've done before. Why?

DIAMANDA GALAS: I grew up with the material. I played since I
was 13 with my father's New Orleans-style band. I used to play piano
with a black Gospel choir. I'd worked on The Singer a long time, but
wasn't able to record it before because it was important to finish
Plague Mass with Mute. This material is dear to me in a different way
than Plague Mass. It deals with the same topics I've had to deal with
myself: isolation, solitary confinement, extreme emotionalism. Gospel
music is music to keep people alive in the face of despair, not in the
sense of giving up, but "Don't put off 'til tomorrow what you can do
today." Not when so many of my friends are dying of AIDS and
trying to stay alive.

I went into a mental institution several years ago_ in '89. Something
about that turned me around a lot. Something about losing so many
people_ and my brother_ turned me around. Each day is a blessing, so
I have the opportunity to do something with that day.  Even if one
assumes that life is meaningless, life ends_ that seems very intellectual
next to the fact that I have x-number more hours to live than
somebody else.

M2: When we interviewed you before [High Frontiers #3]-during the
Litanies of Satan and the Wild Woman with Steakknives period-your
technique was fantastic, but you hadn't found a subject to match it.
AIDS is certainly a subject that matches your expressive ability.

DG: That's true. The usual approach to subjects like that is sedative.
Pop music generally dilutes the subject so that people can live with it
without having to confront anything unpleasant.

M2: And in the last part of the 20th century we are more emotionally
self-aware, so that while 100 years ago Mahler's Kindertötenlieder
may have been painfully emotional, it sounds boring to most moderns.

DG: I do love that though.

M2: So do we. The Singer and Plague Mass remind us of Mahler-a
small and a large conceptual work on the same subject. How do
people with AIDS react to your performances?

DG: The response is extremely strong in the AIDS community.
Remember, no two people with AIDS are the same simply because
they have AIDS. All I can say is that there are a large number of
people who ask me to continue performing, not just to release the
material, but who insist on my performing everywhere, and those are
my friends in different cities-people with AIDS, people with HIV.

The question you ask is a good one because there are people who will
not go hear something confrontational when they are confronting it
daily. Perhaps they would rather see Madonna or something they can
dance to. I'm not saying there's not a place for that because there
certainly is. But as an artist I have to create what I see and what I
hear, what I imagine, what I know to be true, backed with research so
that it is grounded in reality. I can't make my material more palatable
even if I don't want my audience to have to go through that. There are
people who get power from it, and there are people who do not want
to sit through it.

That's something I think about a lot. When I think like that I'll go
sing Christmas carols in a veteran's hospital for people with AIDS.
That's my work when it comes to caregiving.  I don't go in there and
sing Plague Mass.

M2: Much of the press suggests that Plague Mass was intentionally
confrontational.

DG: Yes. I don't mean "confronting" as if I'm trying to confront
somebody in the audience. As in Iannis Xenakis's work, someone
would ask, "Is that confrontational?" and he would say "No, that's
what I hear." It's greeted with shock because it's atypical.  I've never
been interested in willful provocateurism_ I'm too selfish for that. 

M2: Were you surprised at the response of the Catholic Church?

DG: The blasphemy in Italy? That was really gigantic. It still remains.
We're going back to Italy after 3 or 4 years. The head of my record
company asked me to have a fucking bodyguard. It's because we
always see the press, and there's 40 scandal sheets in national news.
Pictures of the District Commissioner discussing "La Scandale
Galas"_ not even pictures of me, pictures of him in the building, as if
someone had been murdered there.  No, none of that was the intent of
the work. The museum that presented me in Florence was attacked by
the Christian Democratic Party and by the Commissioner, who said
there would never be another festival in that city again. We were
defended by a lot of gay groups, Communist groups and so forth. The
festival wasn't closed down, but they tried to close it down. It was like
walking into a room and accidentally knocking over a lamp and
starting a fire. 

M2: In Italy there's a tradition for twitting the Catholic Church. The
end of Act I of Tosca-Scarpia plotting Tosca's rape to the Te
Deum-everyone thinks it's great art.  And that's not what you did.

DG: As people in the Catholic Church see suffering, it's old, like the
martyrs, and they can be voyeuristically thrilled and titillated. I'm
talking about blood and muscle hanging from the cross and stinking
up the room. Death by crucifixion is prolonged torture, the back
breaks one vertebrae at a time. I'm not talking about pain as
eroticism.

When I do "No More Tickets to My Funeral," when I say "Were you
witness on that bloody day and on that holy day_?" And I go on "On
his dying bed_ to all cowards and voyeurs," that means crucifixion of
the innocent. Cowards and voyeurs-someone who comes to the
funeral, but was never there when the person was sick. And cries. That
is disgusting. I've had friends die of AIDS; that's what it's like to have
people call up afterwards and say they were so busy for the last year
and so-and-so didn't look very well and they thought they'd wait until
he got better. And people asking me, "When do you think there's
going to be a cure?" It's a voyeuristic question. "When do you think
you and your faggot friends are going to figure this out?"

M2: Certainly there's been a media circus.

DG: The newspaper is no longer a medium of communication for
people who are sick.  They are not serving anyone at all who has
AIDS. They serve people that want titillation.  That's what sells
newspapers. It's "Bobby X hung himself when he realized he had HIV. 
His friend said he couldn't fight it anymore." That space you could use
to say, "You have been notified that there's no DDI available. This
drug can be procured through Buyer's Club's in Florida and in New
York through PWA_" None of that. That creates incredible isolation.
A lot of my work deals with death by isolation, or the struggle against
isolation.

The piece that I did at the Kitchen, Vena Cava, dealt with AIDS
dementia and clinical depression. Often people with AIDS dementia
are seen as victims of atrophy of the brain, and "incapable of making
decisions." So when a person with AIDS starts to act in a way that
people don't understand, he may be classified as AIDS dementia,
which means that he is no longer listened to, no longer taken seriously.
His treatment preferences are not taken into consideration. The
person is demoralized by doctors and people around him. Induced
madness.

It is absolute madness having HIV in this society, because of what
we're dealing with- insurance companies find out you're HIV positive,
forget that. The lack of communication systems. The fact that people
treat someone with AIDS as a patient instead of a friend as soon as
they find out. Often the person's family wasn't even there until the last
two or three weeks. The person has to go through the psychological
torture of having family members in charge of decisions who may only
be interested in what's left behind or on a control trip or a guilt trip,
or trying to prove to him in the last three weeks of his life that they
love him more than anyone else, or that his friends are responsible for
his illness and death. And those friends are condemned not to be able
to come into the room, not to be there in the last few weeks. Torture.
And then the funeral, which is of no importance to the dead, but
which excludes friends, and becomes a parent-and-priestly function.

That is where Plague Mass differs sharply from the traditional
Requiem masses.  Although they speak of mourning for the dead, they
are really designed to take care of the survivors.

M2: The Mozart and Brahms Requiems are music about the fact that
everybody will die. Kindertötenlieder is music about special people
dying before their time. Plague Mass is frightening because it's more
intense than the Requiems and more personal than the Mahler. You
argue eloquently that dying of AIDS in this society is qualitatively
different than dying of anything else.

DG: It's insult added to injury. It's humiliation. The people that I
know who are living with AIDS are unusual. They're very strong.
People who die the fastest with AIDS are generally people who don't
want to fight. Perhaps they came out of a family structure that said if
you get this it's divine punishment, and you don't deserve to live.
That's really sad, because a person with AIDS has to fight every
moment, doing his or her own drug research, telling the doctor to get
him this or "I'll get it myself." Because no one fights as hard as the
person condemned to die. 

M2: What's your live show like for The Singer?

DG: It's a concert for piano and voice. With a heavy psychedelic edge.
Unfortunately the recorded product can only go so far, especially with
my voice. It's a kind of dubbed imitation. The performance is different
every night. I've changed certain words throughout the songs to
relocate them within the isolation chamber of a person surrounded by
the quarantine mentality. Isolation has always been the content of
blues and Gospel music. It's music you sing when you're by yourself
and can't change anything. Since I heard that music at my father's
house, if I was alone I would sing those songs, which have 

so much resonance: "Balm in Gilead," "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
I'm not singing about a band of angels coming to give me peaceful
delusions. A band of angels coming to drag me to the grave is more
what I'm saying. Bloodhounds, people seeking you out so you don't
even have a chance to die in peace.

 I'm using the language of despair, extreme language: "Lord God, why
hast thou 

forsaken me?" My favorite is Psalm 88: "Oh Lord God of my
salvation, I cry day and night before thee_ My soul goeth near to the
grave_ Thou hast cut me off." That is an archetypal language of
suffering, certainly equal to any poet. If it's written by the Old
Testament poets to show suffering, then it can lie alongside Sophocles,
Euripides, whomever. It's just that it seems to me to have been taken
out of context by idiots.

M2: You made a comment once about Greek women and Middle
Eastern song. The Psalms are in a Semitic tradition, with far more
extreme emotionalism than the West. 

DG: Well, all the Jews I know are delighted I didn't use the New
Testament, and can relate exactly to the Old Testament used in the
Plague Mass. But this wouldn't surprise Penderewski or Lutoslawski. 

M2: Or Nietszche or Walter Kaufmann.

DG: Precisely. Plague Mass has only been performed in America
seven times. Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Philadelphia, Washington
D.C., and New York. People are terrified of presenting Plague Mass.
After this piano tour, which is organized by a rock 'n' roll promoter,
and quite successfully-we had 1,000 people in the audience last
night-you art motherfuckers who are afraid of me_ Fuck you! I will
organize it myself. I am not waiting for your approval. "The texts are
too strong. It's not politically correct liberal sentiment."  I'm not a
liberal!

M2: You're up against the limits of what performance art is
comfortable with.

DG: Yeah, I never use that word for myself. I use the word auteur, as
Hitchcock would.  Yes, I compose the music and I perform the music
and I compose the libretto and I design the lights until I turn it over
to a professional lighting designer. But Wagner did that, too!  People
who call this performance art do it out of sexism-any woman who
organizes a gesamtkunstwerke is condemned to this territory. The
texts that I use are too complicated for these people. They want
someone making a speech, "Isn't it terrible that we are all dying of
AIDS?" I can't be bothered talking like that.

M2: And you spend a lot of time perfecting your technique. That's in
conflict with the notion, "It's good enough for performance art." It
makes a difference if you're better technically, you communicate more.
That just isn't believed anymore.

DG: Right. People like Goya were born artists, and they mastered
their craft so they could say what they heard, what is true to them,
their visions, their nightmares. Plague Mass wasn't greeted like New
York performance art-it was greeted like a mass, which it is.  That's
what did it. And that's why it's what I do, not, "I have a message and
I'm going to find a way to say it." Forget it. Be a politician.

M2: How long can you sing in your style? It's not the easiest thing to
do three times a week.

DG: I've been doing it four or five times a week.

M2: That's more than a Wagnerian soprano.

DG: I'm doing two shows in San Francisco on the same night because
it's sold out. I've never done that before. This tour has also paved the
way towards my collaboration with the rock 'n' roll promoters who
can produce Plague Mass. So far, nobody has been able to do it in this
town_ San Francisco_ it's a joke.

M2: If you can get the rock 'n' roll promoters to back you, they'll be
easier to work with than the art music promoters. They're not trying
to prove anything to anybody about Art. If they can sell the gate,
they're happy to have you.

DG: You have to make sure they get their money. Once you figure
that out, then you can do what you want. I've been told by the art
world that they love my work, but they just can't present it. Or the
opera world, which is so conservative and so stupid. Plague Mass
should be done at Davies Hall or the SF Opera House. Zellerbach in
Berkeley discussed it with me a while ago, but I wanted to do it in San
Francisco proper. I wanted originally to do it in Grace
Cathedral-they've been pretty militant there, at least active, about the
AIDS thing.

M2: What are your next records going to be?

DG: The next record is Vena Cava. That's the kind of record company
I have. Vena Cava, which I would never have assumed anyone would
want to record, because it's just out there. I don't even know how
good a recorded document can be made. After that, I don't know. I'll
probably do an album of operatic arias or something. I'll do whatever
I feel like doing.