Anna Harutyunyan. The voice of Galas

The voice of Galas
Anna Harutyunyan

Date of publication: September 26, 2000

" Defixiones Defixiones were made of stone and placed at the head of the graves. They meant a warning: do not dig in the graves. Those that interest me threatened the Turks so that they would not dig up the graves of Armenians or Greeks."

The multi-octave, multilingual Moscow performance of the Greek singer Diamanda Galas, called Defixiones: Will and Testament , was dedicated to this stone threat .

Galas, among other things, is a political activist, and in many high-profile interviews has already made quite a splash about what she wants to express in her new album and what she demands from the audience and from the world. If her previous albums were accompanied by public actions against AIDS and against "speedophobia", then the current project was preceded by many descriptions of the Armenian and Greek genocide of 1915, reflected in Armenian and Greek poetry, for which Galas created such suitable music. And not in vain: it turned out that there are educated people who were hearing about the Armenian massacre for the first time.

However, when a lonely long figure in a simple black dress with black hair and fiery black eyes quietly, almost modestly, enters the dim stage and begins to sing in a shrill voice some otherworldly oriental motifs, full of human despair, words become unimportant. The most important thing was Galas’s extraordinary voice, which cut to the living. The first note already expressed everything - so no translations, no explanations, no introductory speeches were required.

First, several songs were played, which Galas sang without accompaniment in some oriental languages ​​(sometimes a recorded female voice mysteriously intervened, reading something in Armenian). These songs with oriental modulations are part of a long-standing musical culture (the so-called rembetika) of the Armenian, Greek, Turkic and other minorities who roamed the Middle East.

Then Galas sang to her own accompaniment (she is as masterful of the piano as she is of her voice), and each song acquired the character and power of each language in which it was performed. Galas sang in French (perhaps again her favorite poet, Charles Baudelaire), in German, in Spanish, in English... In one of the last blues ballads, sung in the voice of a true black woman, the words were heard: “God, when I will be gone, let my grave be clean."

Galas herself said that not understanding the language gives listeners the opportunity to focus on the sound, and she proved it. She expresses everything she needs through singing. And what exactly - evidence of human suffering or certain political demands - can only be heard.