Mi Jardín de Calla solo | by Wallace & Knowles

Notes from the song composer

Mi Jardín de Calla was written in the winter of 2007 as a solo song for voice and guitar for David Newsam, director of the Boston Classical Guitar Society, to be performed in the spring of 2007 on an evening of “The Music of Frank Wallace.” As concert plans progressed, Wallace took the opportunity to use all 12 performers and scored the piece for the evening.

The music attempts to describe in a very simple way the conflict in the poetry between indigenous people and conquering culture. There is a constant dialogue between a two measure long syncopated, dance-like theme and a similarly short motive of parallel fifths. the former is like street music or folk music and the latter reminiscent of the religious chant of the Church – that being the 16th century catholic church, of course.

Notes from the poet

I wrote this poem in 2005 in Peru’s lovely southern city of Arequipa while on a Duo LiveOak concert tour with Frank Wallace. For both of us, our many concerts in Romanesque churches in northern Spain had forever influenced our music and changed our ears. Imagine our delight to find colonial-era barrel vaults all over Arequipa. In one empty rambling building I wandered from open courtyards through breezy arched passageways in an spiral ever-inward, ever farther from the street noises, until I stumbled upon, deep in the center of the building, a tiny hidden garden filled with calla lilies. The beginning of the poem refers to the era of the conquistadores—the irony of the beauty of their culture alongside their destruction of the indigenous cultures they conquered. The word calla in the title is a play on the verb callar, which means to be quiet.  Nancy Knowles

Click here to see Knowles’ beautiful photographic essay from that tour, Mi Jardín de Calla.