It was a performance of Vinko Globokar's Un Jour Comme un Autre (A Day Like Any Other), an opera based on Amnesty International's documentation about the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. Īt the same time, Galás was preparing for her live solo debut, which took place at the 1979 Festival d'Avignon, in France, where she was doing post-graduate studies. ![]() She later collaborated with members of the San Diego band CETA VI, which included, among others, jazz saxophonist Jim French, with whom Galás went on to record and release her first compositions, as part of the album If Looks Could Kill (1979), together with guitarist and sound engineer Henry Kaiser. In the early 1970s, Galás and her friend contra-bass player Mark Dresser joined the jazz band Black Music Infinity, which included drummer Stanley Crouch, trumpeter Bobby Bradford, cornetist Butch Morris, flutist James Newton, and saxophonist David Murray. Outside academia, Galás's vocal training was supported by private lessons in San Diego with bel canto tutor Frank Kelly, and with voice coaches Vicky Hall in Berlin and Barbara Maier in New York. Her post-graduate studies include a master's program in the music department of the University of California, San Diego, which encouraged her to work at its Center for Music Experiment to develop her own vocal technique. In the 1970s, Galás studied biochemistry at the University of Southern California, specializing in immunology and hematology studies. Their inspirations were the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and Edgar Allan Poe. Galás and her brother Phillip-Dimitri acquired a taste for dark literature at an early age. But while her father encouraged her to play the piano, he did not want her to sing because he believed that singing was for "hookers and idiots." By the age of fourteen, she had been playing gigs in San Diego with her father's band, performing Greek and Arabic music, and she had also made her orchestral debut with the San Diego Symphony as the soloist for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. Galas also took cello and violin lessons, and studied a wide range of musical forms. Her father, who was a gospel choir director, taught her how to play the piano when she was three years old, while introducing her later to classical music, the New Orleans jazz tradition, rebetika and other classics of his Greek heritage, some blues standards, and other historical music genres. ![]() Galás's first contact with music was during her childhood in San Diego, where her parents lived and worked as teachers. Galás does not refer to her Smyrniote and Pontic ancestry as " Turkish", but rather as Anatolian. Her father's Greek ancestors were from Smyrna, Pontus, and Chios, while one of his grandmothers was an Egyptian from Alexandria. Galás was born and raised in San Diego, California, to a Maniot Greek-American mother from Dover, New Hampshire, Georgianna Koutrelakos-Galás, and an Egyptian-American father from Lynn, Massachusetts, James Galás, both of whom belonged to the Greek Orthodox culture but considered themselves agnostic. Galás's recordings have also included collaborations, some of which are with the bands Recoil and Erasure, instrumentalist Barry Adamson, and musician Can Oral (also known as Khan), among others. Īs a composer, pianist, organist and performance artist, Galás has presented mainly her own work, but her live performances have also included works by other musicians, such as the avant-garde composers Iannis Xenakis and Vinko Globokar, jazz musician Bobby Bradford, saxophonist John Zorn, and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Galás has attracted the attention of the press particularly for her voice – a soprano sfogato – and written accounts that describe her work as original and thought-provoking refer to her as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", an "aesthetic revolutionary", "a mourner for the world's victims" and "an envoy of risk, honesty and commitment". ![]() 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. ![]() She has campaigned for AIDS education and the rights of the infected. Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, visual artist, and soprano.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |