Diamanda Galás: One Long Mad Scene

Abstract

Every year, in a first-year undergraduate module I teach on non-notational models of music analysis, I play a cheap trick. In their first week of their first semester, 80 or so bright-eyed students stare expectantly at me, waiting for me to impart some kind of wisdom on the question of how of analyze music that does not conform to standard Western notational models, or what setting aside the score can do to benefit the analytical project, or (for some) how to analyze music at all when they have no musical background; I play all 49 seconds of Diamanda Galás’s “Cunt,” from her Schrei X (1996).

Don’t be afraid; I must tell you what I saw so people will understand the crimes men do to men.

—Diamanda Galás/Atom Yarjanian, “The Dance”, Defixiones, Will and Testament