The gala's core repertoire was public grief performed as liturgy. City laments, the best known being the Lament for Ur, mourned the destruction of great Sumerian cities in a mythic register that blamed divine abandonment rather than simple military defeat, and balag and ershemma compositions mourned dying or absent gods, chiefly Dumuzi, whose seasonal death and descent to the underworld structured a whole cycle of gala performance. These works were composed and sung in Emesal, a distinct literary register of Sumerian used almost nowhere else except in the speech the literature gives to goddesses, which is itself a strong clue to how closely Mesopotamian tradition bound the gala office to feminine or liminal ritual speech.
Performance was accompanied by specific percussion, the balag drum the office is partly named for and the lilissu kettledrum, whose construction and consecration required their own ritual, since an improperly made lament drum was thought incapable of carrying a lament's power. Gala were attached to major temples on a professional, salaried basis, appearing in administrative texts receiving land, rations and exemptions like any other skilled temple specialist, which underlines that lamentation was treated as a technical craft requiring formal training, not a spontaneous outpouring available to anyone.