Diamanda Galás performs "De-Formation"
Diamanda Galás performs her De-Formation: Piano Variations, a substantial solo piano work that I assisted with transcribing. The program also includes Maryanne Amacher’s piano duo, Petra, performed by Galás with Stefan Tcherepnin. More information here.
Over two nights at Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection, Blank Forms presents two artists whose work takes orthogonal approaches to notation. Using the archival notes and sketches of Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009), several of the artist’s longtime collaborators reconstruct GLIA and Petra, two pieces from her oeuvre which are notable exceptions to Amacher’s ethos of ephemerality; the majority of her work has too many undocumented but temporally and spatially specific parameters to be restaged posthumously. Meanwhile, Diamanda Galás, Amacher’s friend and fellow traveler through the extremities of the music world, performs De-formation, a solo piano work about the plight of gueules cassées, disfigured WWI veterans referred to in the French as “broken faces.” Galás improvised De-formation in 2019; in 2023, she transcribed it with the help of Thomas Feng, making the piece reproducible for the first time.
