Diamanda Galás | Artist
Diamanda Galás is a Greek-American dramatic soprano, composer, pianist, organist, performance artist, and painter born 1955 in San Diego, California. Galás creates highly original and thought provoking political performance works. One of her major early works, Plague Mass, concerns the AIDS epidemic, a disease which took her brother, the playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, in 1986. Her soprano voice is powerful but deeply unnerving. At 13, Galás began playing gigs in San Diego with her father's band, performing Greek and Arabic music. Her father, who had egyptian-greek heritage, also introduced her to classical, blues standards, and rebetika music. At 14 Galás made her orchestral debut with the San Diego Symphony as the piano soloist for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.1. In the 1970s, Galás studied biochemistry and the University of Southern California, specializing in immunology and haematology studies. Galás made her professional debut in Europe while doing post-graduate studies there in 1979. She made her solo performance debut at the Festival d'Avignon performing lead In Un Jour comme un autre, by composer Vinko Globokar, a work based upon Amnesty International's documentation of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. As well as her solo works she has collaborated with avant-garde composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Vinko Globokar and John Zorn. Outstanding albums include Diamanda Galas (1984), The Divine Punishment (1986), Saint of the Pit (1986), Plague Mass (1991), and Defixiones, Will and Testament (2003). The 1988 compilation Masque of the Red Death is also recommended. Galás's commitment to addressing social issues and her involvement in collective action has made her concentrate on themes such as AIDS, mental illness, despair, loss of dignity, political injustice, historical revisionism, and war crimes. All heavy issues, which perhaps explains one critic's appraisal of Galas as "a mourner for the world's victims." As a girl, Galás acquired a taste for dark literature by authors such as Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and Edgar Allan Poe. Galás is also active in the fields of visual arts and film. She made a voice cameo performing voices for the Japanese assassins and flying weapons in Ninja III: The Domination. This was followed by three more film appearances: the voice of the witch in John Milius's Conan the Barbarian (1982), the voice of the dead in Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow, and Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, where she contributed erotically charged moans, breathless sighs, and high-pitched shrieks.
Artist Website: diamandagalas.com
Featured Albums: Diamanda Galás
Related Artists: John Paul Jones, Diamanda Galas
Collections: Women of Note
