Soundtrack to holocaust

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Defixiones: Orders From the Dead, is a collection of poems written by dissidents on the subject of the genocide which occurred between 1914 and 1923 in Armenian, Assyrian and Anatolian Greece. Galas herself, is descended from the same people who were "forced into the desert on death marches or pushed into the Aegean Sea." This horrific so-called "ethnic cleansing", committed by the Ottoman Turks and condoned by allied nations, is the inspiration for the performance created, composed and performed by Diamanda Galas. Her protest is that this genocide has been denied and forgotten, millions of deaths effectively erased from the consciousness of the new European Community.

It was certainly appropriate to hear the original language, the texture of the words choking and rasping in her throat, but when reading the translated content of the material, of rape, slaughter and torture, it would have been beneficial and far more resonant to have understood each word as it was sung. The melodies in traditional Middle Eastern style ringletting and landing in passages of percussive words caught in Galas' throat. She certainly is an engaging performer, yet it was difficult to remain riveted to every word (as one would like to have been) when the vast majority of the audience were perhaps, like me, a little alienated by their inability to understand the content of each emotional moment.After several gruelling numbers at the lecturn, Galas slowly walked to the grand piano, two large cast iron candelabra abreast of it with candles flickering, and a barndoor light sitting in front, waiting for its moment. She is an accomplished pianist; in San Diego, where she grew up, her parents encouraged her from a young age to pursue her talents. Her playing was again highly repetetive and traversed a Middle Eastern mode. Though gothic in presentation and churchlike with its low and obscure choral rumble, her music is not entirely hypnotic or ecclesiastical. Galas subverts these traditional forms with her melodramatic rasp and wail of a voice, conjuring images of the distraught widow lashing her grief against the coffin during the burial ceremony. In a sense this is a church service hosted by Galas to honor the dead who were forgotten or erased in the genocide. "You cannot erase the dead," she repeats in Orders from the Dead, one of the few pieces spoken in English. She seeks to avenge through performance the unjust and unimaginably cruel and evil killings. Galas' church is, like her words, like the people the words speak of, on fire, although it was a smoldering fire until later in the performance.

About three quarters of the way through the show came the climactic point, a great grinding indistinct march above the deep drone, the clank of metal percussive and ringing, an eery buzzing like a spiral of flies. She held two microphones above her head ritualistically and dragged her feet up the central catwalk. A diffuse spot swept across the audience, exposing us, the barndoor light opened and another light shot up a spectral shadow on the curtain behind her. Shattering screams broke from her mouth, tearing like glass scraped down metal, and she employed the use of both microphones to pan jabbering grief. The two microphones is a technique that Galas has been using for the best part of her avante-garde career now. Macabrely lit from low angles with a spilling of red, she interacted with the looping backing tape that lurched heavily but to great effect.

Later in the performance a swirling capillary light seared red across her face and onto the curtain behind as she recited one of the only full poems in English, the title poem Orders from the Dead, written by Galas with excerpts from Farewell Anatolia, by Dido Soteriou. She is deliberate and clear in her delivery. Her hand gestures are spare and well chosen, a fist raised once here or a finger that directs a warning there. However, by this late stage in the show I knew the climactic moment had already occurred. This second dose just wasn't packing the punch. I wished that it had been more heavily edited, so as to not erode the depth and meat of the words by labouring them. You could also see the repetition as a relentless onslaught, to subdue the audience to meditate through incantation after incantation, but it was actually became tedious and wearing as we restlessly waited out the words that should have been weighty with their impact.

Though she is admirable in her conviction and assertion of the "personal being political," her avante-garde theatrics sit anachronistically with the real-life drama of rape, torching people alive, and horrific degradation in early 20th Century Middle East. Anyway, it was a great excuse for the goths to put on their finery.
Despite the language barrier (which could have more effectively been transcended with surtitles) Galas has used her art to educate her audience on a truly appalling period in European history and uses the performance Defixiones:Orders From the Dead as a warning on current genocidal killings, where the parallels with the past are all too clear.

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Lost in a flurry of words

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Allow me to quote:
"The Tokyo String Quartet was founded in 1969. Although only one original member remains, it began its latest Australian tour in Melbourne demonstrating a refined, restrained elegance that one would expect from such an experienced ensemble."

Are you implying we don't got ensemble, punk? Step over here...we'll SHOW you some ensemble...

What begins looking like a non sequitur - "Although only one original member remains, it began its latest Australian tour in Melbourne" - salvages itself briefly at "demonstrating a refined, restrained elegance" only to fall into hopeless confusion and contradiction with the phrase "experienced ensemble". If we read the intent below the flurry of words, what the writer means to say is, "don't worry; even though only one original member of this venerable quartet survives, you will hear the playing of an experienced ensemble". All of this without informing the reader that, perhaps, the newer members of the quartet may in any case have several years of ensemble playing behind them (I don't know, and the reviewer doesn't tell us).
Passing from the opaque opening, the reader is treated to one of those verbal variations which, in the right place, are useful and elegant but which, when used slavishly because of a fear of repetition of like words, exposes the writer to charges of tone-deafness. To wit:
"It took the foursome a while to open up, however. Mozart's String Quartet K.464 was prettily played but didn't engage the audience. More satisfying was Beethoven's String Quartet No.6, Op.135."
The writer searches out the word "foursome" as an alternative to the perfectly fitting term "quartet" for fear that the proximity of that term twice more in the same sentence in the titles of the two pieces referred to would lay him open to charges of monotony and lack of imagination.
A little deeper into the review, we find this dual assertion:
"It is clear that the letters have energised Sculthorpe's imagination; it is equally clear that the composition draws on much of his earlier writing for string quartet."
How and to whom is it clear that Sculthorpe's imagination has been energised? And, if it is equally clear that the piece draws on Sculthorpe's earlier writing (known around the traps as "filching"), is that not more clearly evidence of an imaginative block than of an imaginative energy? Especially as, and I quote:
"The last movement uses almost identical structures to String Quartet No.14, Quamby, with soaring violin lines over triplet arpeggios. The two works even finish with the same chord in the same key."
For someone with an ear and musical knowledge so acute, that he can pick up the same chord in the same key for two separate works, his deafness to the musical features of language is remarkable.
Meanwhile, back at the review, the birds are playing at being metaphors, being able to "cross over the razor wire at will". What plodding language! What drear! What point?
"Birds are, of course, a recurring theme in Sculthorpe's writing. He has made the sound of seagulls his own and uses it here to great effect."
Well, good for him. If he can render the malignant sound of scavenging seagulls musical, that is quite a feat.
Have you, dear reader, had enough? I certainly have.

Read Martin Ball's original review.

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