Diamanda Galas: Diva of the Dispossessed

http://exclaim.ca/music/article/diamanda_galas-diva_of_dispossessed

Mornin fags. Just catching up on the nightshift work. Saw this article and there is just so much shit on this animal

a few selections from the article

Galás studies biochemistry at the University of Southern California,

specialising in immunology and hematology —studies she will put to great use later in her career.

She is regularly accused of Satanism, has been denounced as a heretic by the Italian government, and has been called a witch in every town she's ever played in.

Galás is well-known for her work with the AIDS activist group ACT-UP, and her defining work is her Plague Mass trilogy of the late ‘80s, in which she explored the AIDS epidemic by linking it to biblical text from Psalms and the Book of Leviticus

Galás moves to Oakland, California, where she moves in with three black transvestite prostitutes, whom she credits with teaching her everything she wanted to know about femininity and the strength of being a woman. One weekend, they dare her to turn a few tricks to raise some rent money.

After university, Galás starts performing at various psychiatric institutions in California, at the suggestion of friends who think her work will have an affinity with that kind of crowd

Galás makes her solo debut with the album Litanies of Satan

1990 - Galás returns to church, only this time with an invitation. She performs the entire Plague Mass at the Episcopalian Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, the second largest cathedral in the world. The performance also includes a new, previously unrecorded section of the mass, entitled There Are No More Tickets to the Funeral. It involves more of a theatrical element, including dousing her naked torso with blood while performing at the altar.

>Church inviting in a Satanist?

Galás's 1996 tour is dedicated to her album Schrei X, a 35-minute piece for solo voice performed in quadraphonic sound and total darkness, when she figures ears are at their most vulnerable. It's her harshest work to date, involving sensory deprivation, rape, and a person being continually attacked with no escape. To maintain intimacy, she doesn't perform it for audiences larger than 300 people

>>8745000

Diamanda Galas Digs

https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002241210

American singer and composer. Born to emigrant Anatolian and Greek Orthodox parents, she was initially discouraged from singing but encouraged to foster her talent as a pianist; she performed Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the San Diego SO at the age of 14. As a teenager, she played jazz piano in San Francisco and, using the pseudonym Miss Zina, worked alongside African American drag queens in Oakland’s underground. She later worked in the hematology and immunology departments at Scripps College and, while studying psychology and music (1974–79), at the University of California, San Diego medical school. With other students she participated in biochemical experiments involving sadomasochism, acid, and mental illness. During this time she gave performances of wordless vocal improvisations at mental institutions, singing with her back to the patients. From 1979 through the early 1980s, she toured internationally as an avant-garde vocalist, performing works by Vinko Globokar and Iannis Xenakis, with whom she had studied, as well as her own compositions….