De-formation: Second Piano Variations

2025

Available at Bandcamp after 11/1/2025

In the Paris springtime of 2025, Diamanda Galás performed the Second Piano Variations of her De-formation, a recomposition of her solo piano work from ”Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital),” a musical setting of Georg Heym’s early 20th Century expressionist poem about patients isolated and stigmatised by yellow fever. In performance, the intimate concert room in the basement of the Pinault Collection became hushed and reverent, soft lighting arranged like church candles casting gothic shadows across the stage for Galás' first live performance since 2018.

The first iteration of the piece, De-formation: Piano Variations was released digitally and on CD in 2020. This new version rewrites the forceful original, prompted by an invitation to perform at a two-day Hommage à Maryanne Amacher at the Pinault Collection. Galás had met Amacher on multiple occasions from the mid 1980s onwards (she once arrived to find Amacher had gathered all the press cuttings of her work and stuck them on the wall, and was the “Black Witch” to Amacher’s “White Witch”), and although they never talked about their shared compositional commitments to sonic intensities and high volumes, they forged a personal connection.

To reach the point of performance Galás enacted an archaeology on her 2020 original, taking her prompts and basic notation and "blasting through the original structure I had created, then recreating it for this performance, block by block." From her documentation, Diamanda Galás and pianist Thomas Feng (a specialist in notating difficult piano music) prepared a full score of the 2020 version, from which she began to relearn the piece, recomposing phrasing, silences, strict dynamic changes, and chord progressions, finding moments for pause and power, bringing new grace to the music and sculpting the muscle of the source material. In order to exact the dynamic changes she now heard, Galás worked for months on combining food pedals (the score is notated with pedal markings and will be available in 2026 for pianists).

The intentional aggression and sheer force of Galás' playing draws out its power into a cumulus of fury that falls away into near-silence. An 8-legged arachnid drops precipitously on the belly of the instrument, delicately falling towards melody, before this pale grace is stripped of its gentle resonances to be remade in the brutalism of the De-formation, where notes crack as hammer hits metal.

De-formation: Second Piano Variations gifts breath and space into the fetid air of the fever hospitals that are its subject, retaining the intensity of its execution and finding Galás playing hard and true. As above, so below: the 2025 live version takes on the qualities of a studio recording. Through the process of formal scoring, the piece underwent a meticulous revision, which is why this new document is being released today. With the recording quality afforded by the Pinault, it stands as a definitive work, while the 2020 original remains a primarily improvised performance, captured live in the project’s earliest stages.

Solo Piano: Diamanda Galás
Sound Design and Recording: Daniel Neumann
Mastering: Heba Kadry
Lighting: Valentin Delaunay
Photo: Raphael Massart
Cover Design: Luca Zanchi and Edward ODowd
Booking: Anthony Chalmers
TM: Radesh Fernandez
Bandcamp administrator: Tara Blosser
Produced by Intravenal Sound Operations, The Pinault Gallery, and Blank Forms