Diamanda Galás

Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, and visual artist.

She has campaigned for AIDS education and the rights of the infected.

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.

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".

As 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'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.

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.

Her father's Greek ancestors were from Smyrna, Pontus, and Chios, while one of his grandmothers was an Egyptian from Alexandria.

Galás does not refer to her Smyrniote and Pontic ancestry as "Turkish", but rather as Anatolian.

Galás's first contact with music was during her childhood in San Diego, where her parents lived and worked as teachers.

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.

Galas also took cello and violin lessons, and studied a wide range of musical forms.

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. 1.

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."

Galás and her brother Phillip-Dimitri acquired a taste for dark literature at an early age.

Their inspirations were the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and Edgar Allan Poe.

In the 1970s, Galás studied biochemistry at the University of Southern California, specializing in immunology and hematology studies.

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.

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 Gustern in New York.

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.

After her return to the US, Galás performed one more work by Xenakis, his composition N'Shima (1975), in the US premiere of it in New York in 1981, alongside soprano Genevieve Renon-McLaughlin, who sang one of the two vocal parts of this piece.

During her time in Paris, Galás also met the Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis, whose composition Akanthos (1977) she sang with IRCAM's Ensemble InterContemporain in 1980, while she was still in Europe.

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.

At 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.

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.

Globokar was the director of the Instruments and Voice department at the music and sound research center IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), where Galás had been doing further experimentation on her vocal technique.

They were 'Panoptikon', which was dedicated to Jack Henry Abbott, whose 1981 autobiographical book In the Belly of the Beast described his experience of the prison system, and 'Tragoudia Apo To Aima Exoun Fonos' ('Song From the Blood of Those Murdered'), a Greek-language piece dedicated to those political prisoners who were either murdered or executed during the Greek military regimes in the years 1967–74.

Her first solo album, The Litanies of Satan (1982), was also an operatic work.

It included only two compositions: a twelve-minute piece entitled 'Wild Women with Steak-Knives', which was described by Galás in the album notes as tragedy-grotesque deriving from her work "Eyes Without Blood", and another lengthy composition, 'Litanies of Satan', an adaptation to music of a section from Charles Baudelare's poem Les Fleurs du Mal.

Her second album, Diamanda Galas (1984), also contained two lengthy compositions.

Galás began writing and performing on the subject of AIDS around 1984, while living in San Francisco.

This theme resulted in the trilogy Masque of the Red Death, an operatic trilogy which included The Divine Punishment (1986), Saint of the Pit (1986) and You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988).

In these three works Galás detailed the suffering of people with AIDS.

Shortly after the recording of the trilogy's first volume began, her brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, became sick with AIDS, which inspired her to join activist groups that raised awareness about this new illness.

Her brother died in 1986, just before the completion of the trilogy.

Taking a break from her own recordings, Galás appeared on the 1989 studio album Moss Side Story by Barry Adamson (formerly of Magazine and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds).

In Moss Side Story, which was described by the press as a "soundtrack for a non-existent film-noir", Galás sang the opening track, 'On the Wrong Side of Relaxation'.

In 1992, Galás released the album Vena Cava, a series of unaccompanied voice pieces recorded in New York during a live performance at The Kitchen.

For her next record, Galás changed stylistic direction by turning to the blues tradition and interpreting a wide range of songs with only a piano and solo voice.

This stylistic turn produced the studio album The Singer (1992), on which she covered songs by Willie Dixon, Roy Acuff, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, as well as "Gloomy Sunday", a song written by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress in 1933 and translated into English by Desmond Carter.