Scream of Fear (Original Title- Taste of Fear), dir. Seth Holt (1961)

"And scream that you may hear yourself,and scream that you may know you're still alive,and alive, and that life on this earth is possible."  - Mahmoud Darwish

Diamanda Galás 'Wild Women With Steak Knives (The Homicidal Love Song for Solo Scream)'







Antonin Artaud, 'Pour En Finir Avec Le Jugement De Dieu' / 'To Have Done With The Judgement of God'

"I have no mouth. And I must scream."

― Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

“Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche

"For this scream I must fall.
It is the scream of the wounded warrior who brushes past the broken walls with a drunken sound of glass.

I fall.
I fall but I am not afraid.
I give up my fear in the sound of rage, in a solemn roaring."

-- Antonin Artaud

"I want to attempt a terrible feminine. The cry of the revolt that is trampled underfoot, of anguish armed for war, of the demand for justice.

It is like the groan of an abyss that is opened: the wounded earth calls out but voices are raised deep as the bottom of the abyss, voices where are the bottom of the abyss crying.

Neuter. Feminine. Masculine.

In order to utter this cry I empty myself. 
Not of air, but of the very power of sound. I raise up in front of myself my human body. And having cast on it "THE EYE" of a horrible measurement, part by part, I force it to re-enter me." 

 - Antonin Artaud

The Cry of Clytaemnestra

THE CRY OF CLYAETEMNESTRA from John Eaton on Vimeo.

"The opera compresses the events of Aeschylus’s play into a densely woven 80-minute sequence. The story is unfolded through the distorted visions of Clytemnestra (mezzo-soprano), who recalls and anticipates past and future events in dream-like succession....The music of the opera is intensely expressive, reflecting the psychological focus of the dramatic presentation. Scored for a 17-piece chamber orchestra (plus electronic tape), the work employs microtonal tuning in both equal-tempered quarter-tone tuning and, more occasionally, just intonation. Eaton distinguishes the two types for dramatic effect, associating the former with states of extreme psychological conflict and the latter with innocence and purity. Formally the opera is organized around a series of recurring, piercing cries emitted by Clytemnestra as she recalls the dreadful events that have overtaken her life. These provide an important element of musical unity and also serve to articulate the overall shape, punctuating the dramatic continuity; they also undergo transformations that mirror Clytemnestra’s shifting psychological orientation: from anguished horror at the opening in reaction to the sacrifice of her daughter, to ‘pure and terrifying’ exaltation at the end as she prepares for her husband’s return and murder. "  -- Oxford Music Online

"How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust were all was lost, including guardian thought? In the mortal intensity, the fleeing silence of the countless cry...

...Silence is perhaps a word, a paradoxical word, the silence of the word silence, yet surely we feel that it is linked to the cry, the voiceless cry, which breaks with all utterances, which is addressed to no one and which no one receives, the cry that lapses and decries. Like writing (and in the same way that the quick of life has already exceeded life) the cry tends to exceed all language, even if it lends itself to recuperation as language effect. It is both sudden and patient; it has the suddenness of the interminable torment which is always over already. The patience of the cry: it does not simply come to a halt, reduced to nonsense, yet it does remain outside of sense-- a meaning infinitely suspended, decried, decipherable, indecipherable." 

 - Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980)

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“Ha! To forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts?" 

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos (1944)


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"Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the legs and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies.....


Music, for its part, is faced with the same task, which is certainly not to render the scream harmonious but to establish a relationship between the sound of the scream and the forces that sustain it.......
If we scream, it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle and that even lie beyond pain and feeling. This is what Bacon means when he says, "I want to paint the scream more than the horror" If we could express this as a dilemma it would be: either I paint the horror and I do not paint the scream, because I make a figuration of the horrible; or else I paint the scream, and I do not paint the visible horror, I will paint the visible horror less and less, since the scream captures or detects an invisible force. Alban Berg knew how to make music out of the scream in the scream of Marie, and then in the very different scream of Lulu"


----Gilles Deluze

Ingrid Sings

"The fundamental reaction against displeasure and anxiety has been, since the beginning of life, the scream. We are born screaming. The reaction we should expect for example from our dreaming Ingrid in her “primitive fear” which she compares to the “fear of newborn children” is the scream. But instead of screaming Ingrid sings.

In their physical aspect it is already evident that scream and song are intimately related. Tone — a basic element of song — is a scream of a specific character differing from the scream in the regularity of its vibrations, or expressed in psychological terms, differing in being submitted to a certain order. Tone compared to scream represents for this same reason, — always in its psychological aspect —, a renunciation of something instinctive (Triebverzicht). Instead of the unrestrained scream, which is on the one hand an aggressive expression of a respiratory-oral nature, arisen as a reaction or defense against the sufferings and anxieties caused by frustrations of instinctive needs, and which on the other hand is an expression of demand for the satisfaction of these instinctive needs, — instead of this unrestrained scream, the tone appears, which, physically, is a scream of regular vibrations and which psychologically we experience —compared to screaming—as being less aggressive, as a more erotic, less terrified, and less terrifying expression." - Heinrich Racker

"Music, then, is a sort of dreaming with the ear; and endless, subtly readjusting refinement of a shriek. At the beginning of any finite musical act there is pandemonium, a vast-omni-expressive noise in which are located all the  sounds that the ear can hear; the musician simply elects a few possibilites out of this confusion of all frequencies and amplitudes. What is yearning? -- weakened terror. What is exhilaration? -- weakened terror. What is the soft cooing of lovers? -- weakened terror. A chord, a timbre, a snatch of song, is moving to the degree that it can allude to the primal scream that lurks behind it." -- Daniel Albright


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