Diamanda Galas: 'Death will come and have your eyes'

QUEEN OF THE AVANT-GARDE

Starting out on the keyboard at a very young age, Diamanda Galás played Brahms, Monk, Beethoven, Billy Strayhorn, Chopin, and Bud Powell side by side. In her twenties she took up the voice and decided to create a different kind of music.

These were her solo performances, which continue now (such as the musical and theatrical work Das Fieberspital, currently in development at the Grotowski Institute in Poland). The works for voice and piano will include new free jazz and jazz standards by Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Bobby Bradford, and Thelonious Monk, as well as cowboy songs, sung by Ralph Stanley and written by Johnny Paycheck, French chansons, original compositions set to the poems of Gottfried Benn and Cesare Pavese, cante jondo, and Middle-Easten Greek Amanes.

Galás' singing employs many traditions, as she has studied many traditions: ancient Middle-Eastern Greek singing, bel canto, blues and country, and many new avant-garde styles of singing that she has been inventing since 1979. Her vocal work incorporates the scales of Anatolia, triplophonic melodies, and coloratura, and her piano work shows the influences of the piano music she has studied above, in additional to avant-garde styles.